So, lately I have been seeing AI bros always using the “It democratizes coding/game dev/modding/drawing/music creation/video editing/insert a hobby that requires actual skills” argument. And it always just irritates me.
Like, democratizing a skill means giving everyone an equal opportunity, which is what free (specially FOSS) tools do, think Krita, Blender, Godot, etc… You get the tools that you need for said hobby free of charge thanks to the GOATed people that maintain them. And then you learn it.
But AI, it just works on the basis of who has more disposable income to feed the capitalist machine. Like where is the “democratization” when the person with more money gets the better experience. Isn’t that the era of paid software all over again? isn’t that literally the opposite?
Yeah, so that is the end of my rant, I just wanted to vent out to people who will understand that sort of thing (talking about a fine echo chamber ;) )
And I hope people point out that stupid argument when they see meatproxies using it :)
The way the speak of democratizing skill reminds me of how in the short story “Harrison Bergeron” they made us read of school.
Essentially to make everyone equal they have to handicap others who are smarter.
In our world we are moving towards that unintentionally. In order to make everyone equal that means the access and use of all said tools must be equal too.
In our world we are slowly dismantling all systems of production to replace it with llms. In the future the epstine class wants for us no one will have access to Photoshop or Godot they will only have ai terminal to interact with. Everyone’s equal now and has equal access to approved information, and equal access to said tools. Yet there is no opritunity for thought, intelligence, creativity outside of said tool. You are capped by what information you are presented and what capabilities the tool allows you to have. People who have the capacity to think outside the box are now restrained by an artificial barrier with no real outlet.
Sure in reality there’s always going to be a separate carve out on the internet where people will still access non-ai tools. But we are those people lol, and I wouldn’t say the fediverse is nessisarly thriving. There’s something like .01% of google search users ever hit page 2 on search results, people are just going to use what ever ai tool or popular service is trending.