Comment on Pika Labs new generative AI video tool unveiled — and it looks like a big deal
archomrade@midwest.social 1 year agoI completely get the confusion, I don’t hold it against you. I never denied that AI models involved theft, i asserted that the problem with AI isn’t about theft.
A luddite in today’s terminology is someone who opposes new technologies, but The Luddites weren’t opposed to the mechanization of their labor per say, they took issue with the commodification of their labor and the private ownership of the machines that aided and sometimes supplanted it. They didn’t go destroying the textile mills because of some principled stance against progress, they were going to war against the capital owners who suppressed them and forced them to compete against the machines that were made by their own hands.
The Luddites (rightly) identified the issue with the ownership of the machines, not the machines themselves. You only have half the picture; yes, they’ve stolen from you (not just your data, but your labor) - but they’ve also withheld from you the value of that product. It’s not the existence of AI that created that relationship, it’s capital.
LWD@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m glad you don’t hold your confusion against me. Can you escape it for a moment to say whether you actually condemn theft or not?
You’re also using a false dichotomy, whether you mean to or not. Textile machines can create more textiles, generative AI can’t create more art, because they can’t create any art to begin with. And, of course, in the real world that you live in, art is something most people do when they finish the labor that pays the bills.
You also fail to mention the Luddites engaged with reality too, and didn’t just talk about ideology all day, like the average Twitter communist is wont to do.
archomrade@midwest.social 1 year ago
Again, no worries for any misgivings or misunderstandings.
True, AI can’t produce art (at least, we can agree that there will always be some absent quality from the product of a generative model that makes human art art), but it can produce many other things of value that does supplant a real person’s product. Likewise, there are qualities of art that make it a commodity that can be sold - to pay the bills - that lessen and sometimes corrupts art. Some may even argue that Art can only be something that is done for the sake of itself and for no other purpose; it is good-in-itself. And funnily enough, craftsmen have been saying for literal centuries that machines can’t reproduce that particular quality innate in hand-made crafts.
I do remember mentioning, and possibly even advocating, for the Luddite course of action though. You’re right, we shouldn’t only sit around and talk shit about theft, we should also be doing the thieving ourselves and raiding of the textile mills.
On theft; would I condemn theft if I didn’t recognize private ownership to begin with? You’re twisting yourself in knots; I can’t help but think it’s because you’re trying so hard to ‘getch’ me.
LWD@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I thought leftist types were supposed to draw a distinction between private and personal property. The giant thieving corporations you defend are stealing people’s personal property and using it for profit.
archomrade@midwest.social 1 year ago
I realize you’re not engaging leftist theory seriously here, but if you were I would recommend this paper on the topic of digital new media as viewed through a Marxist and political economy framework.
Regardless, I don’t see the exploitation of user activity as a theft of ‘personal property’(nor would marx), it is closer to the private ownership of common resources (i.e. private ownership of land and the resources on it, land being the platform where free human activity occurs, and the raw resource as the data being collected). A leftist might assert user activity and communication as a communally shared resource, not one privately exploited, and the resulting tools that utilize that common resource as one that is collectively owned, not privately owned.
Once again, it’s not about theft