Generative AI is the epitome of capitalist "culture". It's the result of a perverse set of incentives to produce slop content quickly and cheaply, but only in the immediate and short term context, as in the long term it is crazily inefficient in its power and resource consumption and the consequent environmental destruction is far greater. The fact it can only produce a facsimile of art, and that only by exploiting and ripping off and then destroying the livelihoods of actual artists is entirely par for the course where capitalist innovation is concerned. I think the goal is to capture and exert corporate control over yet another facet of human existence, all under the guise of providing useful tools to help artists. "Give me convenience or give me death!" as Dead Kennedys put it.

I know there are plenty of people who have argued (cautiously) that AI can be a good thing for artists by allowing quick generation of minor assets and background details for projects, but that seems to me to be misguided, if only because its such a fucking enormous waste of resources for such a trivial use. I don't want to get into moralising arguments about what is "real" or "authentic" art as I really don't know where the line is: it seems too subjective for me to say that AI generated art can't be real or meaningful. I only know that for me the actual process of making things is as important as the finished work. Obviously I'm a complete amateur and not subject to commercial deadlines and pressures, so the question of efficiency doesn't mean a lot to me, and I can see that if you're an artist doing commercial work there is a good incentive to take whatever shortcuts you can if that means you then have more time for your own projects. But I still think the creep of AI should be resisted. Fundamentally its a solution to a non-existent problem. We are already producing far too much slop to consume, so further industrialising and automating the process is entirely unnecessary in my view.