#this is incidentally also my thesis as to why america is about to collapse into fascism

[tehriz]

People are so goddamn callous and entitled about creative works these days.

“We’ll finish this painting with AI! We’ll create songs in the voices of dead artists with AI! We’ll feed all these novels into AI and have it write sequels!” People act like they DESERVE to have “more Beatles songs” or “a sequel that never got written” just because they want it.

I see all this shit being pitched as “ordinary people having the tools to make art” and—setting aside the fact that you already have the tools to make art because you are a person and you just have to learn and put some fucking effort in—it’s NOT “democratizing art” when the training of these models and now the OUTPUT of these models is fundamentally built on exploiting artists and using their voices and their style and their materials as training data without their consent, and then taking away their jobs and their ability to create further art because you’ve wholly devalued it. Just because you want it. Just because you can.

It’s such a reflection of our culture’s obsession with having everything fast and easy and right now, the way the tech industry has designed every product for the last twenty years with purposeful effort to destroy our attention spans and that’s leaked into every aspect of life. It’s a reflection of how the internet making so many things accessible made people feel that they then should have EVERYTHING accessible just because they wanted it.

Remember a few years ago when authors were saying “book piracy directly harms me and makes it so I can’t pay my rent” and people still told them to their faces “but I want your book and I don’t want to spend money on it”? Everyone deserves access to books and literature in general—and very many people have it, through the magic of libraries and the public domain!—but that doesn’t make you entitled to a specific book just because you want it.

It’s a reflection of the way social media made creators easier to see and connect with, which then warped into harassing creators when storylines didn’t go your way, when they made choices you didn’t like, when they were private about part of their identity and you decided that meant you could bully them into sharing it to prove they were “allowed” to write about something. People didn’t just feel entitled to the art, to “have a say” in the art, they felt entitled to the creator too.

People see that making a work of art—a painting, a song, a quilt, a sweater, a book—takes time, and time to learn how to do it and learn how to be good at it, and we’re so used to instant gratification that that’s total anathema. They would rather chew up artists’ works and regurgitate a facsimile of them that they can have Right Now. Because they want it. Because they want it and therefore that means they deserve to get it.

And the thing that gets me the most is the hypocrisy of it. People who proclaim themselves to be social justice-minded, to want to better the planet, turn to these IMMENSELY ENERGY-GUZZLING AND ENVIRONMENTALLY UNFRIENDLY networks to get their word vomit or rearranged pixels and tell artists who can’t afford health insurance to go fuck themselves, because they want something right now and they don’t want to wait.

It’s callous and it’s entitled and it’s soulless, and it makes being a creator so fucking hard. And I don’t know how to stop it except to appeal to people one by one to understand that art is a reflection of our shared humanity, of the work we do every day to live together and make something true and beautiful of our time on this planet, and it’s something that takes time. And that’s not a flaw. It’s the only thing that matters, if we could just fucking slow down and let it happen.

Rage. In my heart. All-consuming. FUCK AI.