I think part of the reality around stochastic-model art that gets lost in a lot of the discussions is the materiality of the money behind it. One of the rehosts of my post from yesterday mentioned people using it as a "free art button", but I think it's really important to understand that it's only free because it's subsidized. Maintaining these massive probability databases isn't free, nor is scraping the entire internet to generate them, nor indeed is running an individual probability cascade to generate one image. And that's not even getting into the colossal number of engineer-hours invested to create the underlying technology—extremely expensive engineers who are a highly-specialized subset of the already-overpaid tech sector.
The companies that are allowing people to use these models are making a conscious business decision to underwrite randos on the internet using them for free. They're also making a decision not to try to enforce any kind of (dubious) copyright claim on the images their models generate. The interesting questions aren't "is this art" (imo it is bad art) or "is this intrinsically moral", they're "who are the capitalists exploiting with this" and "how does that exploitation function".
I hate and oppose this technology not because it's impossible to use it to create good art, but because the overwhelming actual use will be to harm artists and culture. As @tef likes to say, "the purpose of a system is what it does", and so far these stochastic models mostly seem to convince people with money to give less of it to people who make art. This is great for capitalists because it means they have to pay less for their art even if it cannot be made by these models, but more importantly because it turns the means of art production into capital. Suddenly whoever has the most money to invest in data centers and Ph.D engineers gets to charge rent on all the low-end commissions that would otherwise have gone to a bunch of different humans.
Technology is not neutral. If we fall into the trap of thinking about it as an object divorced of its material context, the capitalists have already won.
It's the Uber strategy all over again, the only playbook tech has at this point.
The purpose of corporate generative art is the deliberate attempt to try and "break" another industry where, as yet, they have not been able to fully commoditize and control the entire landscape.
It's as simple as that.
I genuinely believe that the rich hate artists. Creativity is at once something they lack, and that they cannot control, and so they resent it intensely, and in the tech billionaire class there seems to be a particularly acute form of this resentment.
No matter how rich, how powerful, the money men live only on the ideas of other more creative minds, and they fucking hate us for needing us.
They have spent decades campaigning against the idea that artists should own the fruit of their labors and the means of their production, even as they sought to consolidate that ownership to themselves, and now, still unable to wrest absolute control, their fevered minds have convinced themselves that the infinite monkeys are real and if they just light enough oil and cash on fire they can replace us altogether.
I despise it for what it is: nothing less than an existential insult. A statement of intent, of their utter antipathy to us.
They are the enemy, and this is only their latest weapon.
I fully agree with Annie D's analysis. The technology is a means to the specific end of driving down the cost of art labor to the ground by exploiting a legal landscape that's too slow (and hostile to labor) to keep up with tech challenges to its meager labor protections.
The AI is simply an insulation layer from individual intellectual property challenges. Its benefits to the owners of the model are protection from legal liability and flooding the market to drive down the costs of labor.
I think it's interesting to consider the origins of 'Luddites' in this context. They were skilled workers who destroyed machinery to protest protracted mistreatment and underpayment from their bosses, who subsequently had them killed. Over time the term has been vulgarized to mean "anti-tech", but it's true origins are still somewhere deep in the semantic network, because its precisely when you point out potential abuse of a technology by capital that the label gets brought out.
That's why I find the framing of the abuse of the legal framework to be more illustrative of what's actually happening: uber leveraged exploitable contractor laws everywhere almost at once (in legal timescales) and in the process wreaked havoc on existing taxi unions and the 'driver' labor market overall, for the purposes of building a monopoly. this was its purpose and the reason why it continued to receive funding year over year. Capital wants to do the same for other (actually all) labor markets.
