Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement

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Joined 6 months ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • The only reason people are throwing bitch fits over AI/LLM’s is because it’s the first time the “art” industry is experiencing their own futility.

    I would even go further and argue that the art industry doesn’t really care about AI. The people white knighting on the topic are evidently not artists and probably don’t know anybody legitimately living from their art.

    The intellectual property angle makes it the most obvious. Typically independent artists don’t care about IP because they don’t have the means to enforce it. They make zero money from their IP and their business is absolutely not geared towards that - they are artists selling art, not patent trolls selling lawsuits. Copying their “style” or “general vibes” is not harming them, just like recording a piano cover of a musician’s song doesn’t make them lose any tickets sales, or sell fewer vinyls (which are the bulk of their revenue).

    AI is not coming for the job of your independent illustrator pouring their heart and soul into their projects. It is coming for the job of corporate artists illustrating corporate blogs, and those who work in content farms. Basically swapping shitty human made slop for shitty computer made slop. Same for music - if you know any musician who’s losing business because of Suno, then it’s on them cause Suno is really mediocre.

    I have yet to meet any artist with this kind of deep anti-AI sentiment. They are either vaguely anxious about the idea of the thing, but don’t touch it cause they’re busy practicing their craft - or they use the hallucination engines as a tool for inspiration. At any rate there’s no indication that their business has seen much of a slowdown linked to AI.






  • From reading your post it seems like you could be interested by the Jesus movement (that is the jewish followers of Jesus, before catholicism was codified and adopted by the Romans as state religion). Everything that wasn’t authoritarian fear-based catholic was branded as “gnostic heresy” and purged from the canon, but there’s some real good shit that is very close to the core message of Christ.

    A recent(-ish) example of gnostic christianity is catharism, which was a heresy that lasted for a few centuries in the South of France. They had no clergy, just a caste of ascetic wise men and women who would walk the land and dispense wisdom and judgement. Very egalitarian, very spiritual, very christ-like. As you can imagine, they got crushed in one of the rare “self-crusades” in history (meaning the King of France sent his own armies to burn down cities in his own country and murder thousands upon thousands of his own subjects). As you can imagine there is not one history teacher in France who will tell you about this episode.