His argument was literally that

  • artists, writers, and programmers are “labor aristocracy” and deserve no respect because they’re sitting around making art and writing code while other people are toiling and laboring,
  • genAI is a “free resource” (“it’s free for me to use at work”) that “helps everyone make things” instead of having to rely on skill and expertise and therefore makes everything equal,
  • it’s hypocritical of people to be worried about the environmental and societal impact of genAI because “only white people are worried about it now that their hobbies are being threatened and everyone else is catching up”.

Pointing out there there are artists and programmers from every race and economic class, as well as perfectly ordinary people in every walk of life who are all actively being harmed both by the theft of ideas and labor and by the physical effects of gigantic data centers ruining communities, was met with much hand-waving and incredibly impenetrable philosophical jargon.

I’m particularly incensed because I’m as leftist and anticapitalist as they come and this felt like the fuckery some conservative cockwomble would try to come up with to parody socialism, except this guy was completely serious.

  • JasonDJ@lemmy.zipEnglish
    2·
    39 minutes ago

    That’s a part of it, but the proletariat are useful idiots, too. They can take the Anti-AI sentiment to get them to back “anti-AI” representatives and senators.

    Those legislators will support AI “regulation” written by-and-for the top-companies in the industry.

    This will make it incredibly cost-prohibitive for anybody to enter the AI industry new, and cements the top companies at the top, while the smaller companies run around spending every last cent they’ve got to meet the regulations…and when they fail, they will be scooped up by the big cats.

    Don’t be surprised if you start seeing the big guys supporting (or, at least, not disagreeing with) policies that initially seem counter to their interests. It’s a long game thing.

    That’s my prediction, at least…based upon, well, nearly every other industry that everybody hates.