#creators who don't need to worry about starvation and homelessness

[mzminola]

Image: screencap of two tweets from October 16th 2022:

Ryan Silberman @RyanSilberman “I am curious, though, what convinced you to come back to Powerpuff and Foster’s?”

Response, Craig McCracken @CrackMcCraigen “I pitched 16 originals to Netflix.”

fucking constant reboot remake reboot remake reboot remake reboot remake!!!!!!!!!! the tv has only been around for like a century you literally cannot be out of ideas already

[antaresferen]

I think you misunderstand me and put some words in my mouth.

My issue with automation in a non-creative field is that it shows society treats jobless people like shit.

My issue with automation in creative fields is the above and additionally that it converts multimedia and artistic expression fully into another product to be generated and sold by an investor with the right type of machine.

I maintain that AI "art" does give corporate an even bigger hold over mainstream creative media, because it removes what little was left of any potential innovation by the increasingly obsolete creators in the field and makes the profit margins even bigger, exacerbating current monopolism. Yes, independent and small-scale creators can now also push out content faster, but I don't think that will help them as much as it would have to in order to keep up with increasingly aggressive and expensive marketing campaigns by the big guys (because they have increasingly more money for it).

Combined with the way streaming services make anything "less profitable" disappear, I'm worried about what content will remain for mainstream audiences, and what that content will do to their minds.

AI can only remix and regenerate what has been done before. And like it or not (I don't), e.g. Hollywood has massive sway in the majority of the population by already re-releasing, regenerating, and redoing what has been done before. Top Gun 23 in theaters now with an AI-generated Tom Cruise, sure, why not. People will watch.

RE: putting words in my mouth: I didn't say Big Corp multimedia is the only component to culture. But it is a big component of popular culture, which holds significant influence and sway. In turn, I think it's unfair to pin the root of e.g. Rust Belt local culture in "the factory" rather than in the people who moved between the factories, their homes, their neighborhoods...

I think it's also worth noting that your example of an artistic product of non-creative labor's culture is itself also a form of multimedia i.e. poetry. How many books are currently "written"/generated? How many of those drown out actually interesting poetry collections like Rukeyser's Book of the Dead in a BookTok-poisoned world?

Yes, mining and other forms of large-scale industry inform local culture. But what spurred these cultures was that a large group of people spent a lot of time together doing the same thing to achieve the same goal. The issue is that all of that depended on corporate interests. Which is why I maintain that increasing workplace automation shows the need for UBI, improved and more accessible education, worker's rights, etc.

We need to support the ability to form communities, which is what these subcultures were made of and by, not mining or other forms of non-creative labor per se. Better yet, mining is incredibly dangerous, so if a bunch of machines can do it and the ex-miners can live comfortably in a society that cares for them, that's progress to me.

Increasing workplace automation in creative fields, however, impacts more. Some computer "painting" or "telling" stories, at a rate no human creator with an actually interesting story to tell can keep up with, doesn't form community. It forms little bubbles of people who read and watch similar stuff over and over. No innovation because a computer can't do that. But that's no biggie because investors want a safe bet anyway. Big producers become even bigger because their overhead is reduced to almost nothing and they can generate content and commercials at breakneck speed.

In order to preserve culture, both mainstream and fringe, we need to preserve our ability to form community. A factory job under threat of homelessness and starvation in the capitalist world order is not the only way to form community and it's certainly not the best. But having artistic expression converted into yet another product to invest in does threaten our ability to form community. Insular bubbles of people who like the same thing with only slight variation is not community.

How many families are currently getting torn up because individuals get sucked into a QAnon content farm, or some AI porn content farm, or a dark romance content farm, etc? And how much faster will AI make those things work?

Yes, lots of artists are annoyingly arrogant and self-centered. Yes, too much of this discussion focuses on films and books instead of other artisanal products such as certain foods, pottery, furniture design and production, etc. Yes, the issue is bigger than AI and also includes streaming platforms and polarizing social media algorithms. But aren't you especially worried about this?

something kind of gross to me is the way that some artists who post about how AI is going to take their jobs speak in a way that makes it seem like they think they are the first and only profession who has ever faced this kind of existential threat. they just seem fundamentally uninterested in relating the fear they're currently experiencing to the larger context of labor movements and the history of technological advancement/automation's effects on other fields.

they only ever discuss the problem with automating creative labor. there's this sort of implicit stance that when labor they view as not requiring The Divine Spark Of Creation Only A Human Can Possess gets automated that is just the natural course of technological advancement. But when it comes for their labor it's suddenly a completely new thing and a threat to the fabric of our Culture. The idea that creative work should be venerated above other forms of labor and is uniquely deserving of protections is just kinda shitty and stupid.