AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

[matsushima]

The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”

And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs – a figure calculated before the Trump administration pledged a further $500 billion for its ‘Project Stargate’.

-AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism, by Gareth Watkins for New Socialist

Comments

[elyusion]

I really liked this one :]

[lokifan]

Thanks for sharing!

Our most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”

This seems very likely to be true, to me.

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

I've been interested to see how creative people are using AI, not the way it was necessarily intended. A couple examples that caught my eye:

* A writer used a chat program to generate ideas, starting with something like "give me 10 examples of a power that has a nasty catch." (They were actually pretty cool ideas, and not identical to anything I'd seen.) We used to do something like this in writing class where we'd break down elements of an idea to mix-and-match them, thus creating new versions. He picked the one he liked best, then asked for story ideas based on that. After a bit of mixing and matching, he put in a summary of a novel and asked for a chapter outline. And it worked. For someone who is good at writing but bad at or just hates outlining, that's a very useful tool. Also it's not really different from the several genres like romance and mystery that have always relied heavily on formula plots.

An artist is using AI as an underpainting. Put in a prompt, generate a bunch of images, then pick the one with the best composition and values. Then paint over it using a digital art program. This is basically a digital version of an exercise I remember from art class, where we'd take a picture from a magazine or newspaper and paint over it.

They're using AI to do similar kinds of things as used to be done by hand.