This post is currently a work in progress.
The work done by the PayPal Mafia's newest dehumanization venture, OpenAI, is undeniably unignorable. The advancement of the technology to a point where casual users can request output in everyday language and get back something at least somewhat resembling reality is nothing short of a massive achievement, in purely objective terms. Unsurprisingly, however, there's been a fair amount of pushback. The interesting thing about this genre of criticism is that this quasi-Luddism is relatively low-effort, yet people still manage to fuck it up by saying genuinely stupid shit. How often have you heard people comment on DALL-E's art generation capabilities by saying that it can't ever be capable of "true creativity" or some other equally touchy-feely claim? As for OpenAI's biggest rival, Deep Mind, the victory of AlphaGo over Lee Se-dol was characterized by the latter as a hollow victory, because AI can't "understand the beauty of the game the same way that we humans do," which is a hilariously narcissistic claim, given that Lee is assuming that he understands this beauty. In general, people don't know shit about themselves.
Also in recent times, many of these same people have derided NFTs. Again, hating on NFTs (and cryptocurrency in general) is very, very easy. People still fuck it up, though. How many times have you heard people go on about how minting NFTs takes more power than small countries consume in a day, and that this is going to worsen the coming environmental catastrophe? This isn't necessarily wrong, per se, but if you're going to complain, why don't you go on about all the shitty, unoptimized Java code pumped about by Indian IT firms? That's a lot of waste, too. Despite the fact that I have a deeper respect of Indian civilizations (and non-Western civilizations in general) than many of the same people who found that last suggestion troubling, I can't deny that the Indian tech sphere is essentially a giant ploy by Brahmins to evade affirmative action laws, meaning that getting a job there doesn't necessarily imply quality. In essence, this is a less extreme version of Pentti Linkola's call for feline genocide, in the sense that it takes what was previously an idea compatible with feel-good, borderline wine-mom bullshit and takes it to one of its many logical conclusions that's much less palatable than the previous steps. (And for the record, I don't advocate for genociding Indian IT guys. It's not like I'm personally much better, away.)
Returning to AI art, the complaints people have are quite revealing. First, people claim AI doesn't have the creative spark that humans do. Then these people worry about replacement by AI art. That, or they moan about a future filled by nothing but safe, corporate art catering exclusively to bourgeois tastes, except for the moments where it veers into some bizarre distortion purely by chance. (Basically, like Hitler, back when he was a painter.) Well, if AI lacks the "creative spark," why worry about either future? Perhaps what you worry about is that the art you produce is on the same level as this auto-generated art? Of course, we all know the answer: all art is on this level. Though, because the Protestant work ethic makes people overvalue the importance of their bullshit DeviantArt sketches, this is only occasionally admitted. Hence, the anxiety around whether or not one is superior to a computer.
Of course, this is nothing new; this is just the same scenario wherein previous forms of human labor become automated, causing upheaving (cognate with the German Aufhebung) in the sphere of labor, i.e. Marxism 101, which people still suck at. Seriously, I can't emphasize this last point enough. Most explicitly left-wing politics just amounts to a "high" expression of the base human recognition of the suffering of others due to the objective conditions of society. This doesn't make you Marxist, it just means that you aren't 100% mentally ill. Unsurprisingly, emotionally socialist politics don't quite align with a system of thought self-declared as "scientific." Anything even remotely attempting to be scientific must allow for the possibility of coming to decidedly nonhuman conclusions, even (or rather, "especially") those that don't align with human intent.
Remember, all of fake Internet politics belongs to two camps: those led by Pierre Omidyar, and those led by Peter Thiel, still squabbling over the acquisition of PayPal by eBay, but whose respective camps profess politics decidedly opposed to the natural consequences of their leader's industries. These schools only differ on relatively minor issues, such as LGBT rights or the treatment of immigrants. (If you're about to object to my classification of these as "minor issues," read more closely and see the word "relatively" that you missed. Statistics like the disproportionate amount of transgender homeless people might as well be mere aesthetic differences compared the grand designs calculated by Moloch.)
Look, if it makes you feel any better, just do the following: tightly grip a pillow and repeat "the expropriators will be expropriated" until your panic attack has subsided. Just ignore the fact that none of your Internet friend group are likely to personally prove this.
Where was I? Oh yeah, art fucking sucks. It's all a bunch of shit.