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.

  • mrmaplebar@fedia.io
    6·
    18 hours ago

    That is logical equivalent to saying that because property is a capitalist concept theft is a form of socialism.

    So the robber barons are actually socialists too, and wage theft isn’t theft because money shouldn’t exist, and if you can steal candy from a baby that’s ok because ownership doesn’t exist and only the strong survive. Delusional people can justify anything.

    It’s pretty twisted, especially when you consider the players involved, as well as who is being exploited, and who is benefitting from AI the most.

    Even the top brass within Microsoft are quoted as having said that what they’re doing is the “largest theft of labor in history”, and I tend to agree.

    After all, the richest men on Earth are getting richer at the expense of the artist, the thinker, the writer and all forms of intellectual and physical labor. Profit may be theft, but theft is also still theft.