Intellectual property is property. The artist who produces it speculatively is petit bourgeois. The illustrator who produces it as work for hire and is paid for their skill is labour aristocracy. Their privileged positions within capitalist society cannot be valorized by invoking a romanticized workerism.
The loss of those privileged positions would be proletarianization (completely in the case of the artist, finally in the case of the illustrator). In that case, we could object to the alienation of their labour. But we could not do so to a greater (or lesser) degree than for any other worker. The airbrush part assembler, the typesetter, the CD pressing plant worker. The majority of these workers have already lost their roles over time as the production of art and illustration has been operationalized. Are they unskilled labour compared to the skill of the artist or illustrator, if skill is the criterion we are using to privilege the interests of artists and illustrators here? What invisible spark do they lack that disqualifies them?
To treat art and illustration as special, as cries of the soul in a soulless world, is another romanticization. Picking up a paintbrush or installing Procreate doesn’t make you Lord Byron, and Lord Byron is not exactly Stakhanov. That romanticization cannot justly privilege its subjects within the socioeconomic order of capitalism. It can provide a glimpse into a world in which labour’s value is coterminous with its production. But only a glimpse, and only in a partial and very distorted way. Agitpoezda points more in the direction of that world than the figure of The Artist does.
What is alienated from artists and illustrators if we insist on seeing them as proletarian-before-the-fact is their labour. What is stolen from them if we see them as the rightful owners of bourgeois-state-granted property is that property. In the former case we cannot object that others are using the fruits of their labour, as this re-socializes the privatised capital extracted from that labour. In the latter case, rent-seeking is bad.
Corporations will use AI to attack labour regardless of the quality of that AI’s output. This is a matter of class conflict, not aesthetics, and certainly not a matter of romanticizing the wrong figures under capitalism. Calling for stronger copyright to protect the little guy against corporations is turkeys calling for Christmas. Those orgs already have centuries worth of work-for-hire property that they can use as training sets for models. They can then simply out-produce those who have less capital to invest in the production of cultural works, or they can sue those who called for stronger copyright when the work that they craft by hand resembles some of the output of those models.
Those who wish to put their soul into something under capitalism must recognise the limits of that desire as a moral imperative and justification for coercing others. In particular they cannot appeal to the loss of Walter Benjamin’s “aura” from AI output due to a perceived lack of human labour in its aesthetics, while simultaneously bemoaning that AI is “fascism” due to its “theft” of that human work (a word that does Schrodingerian double-duty in this particular shell game). Ignoring the fact that “The Work of Art In The Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is very much an essay about fascism, the romantic figure of the human – of Man – and disgust at his unworthy, parasitic, other is not exactly a line of thought resistant to fascism.
The figure of the artist is not an auratic superman underwritten by Walter Benjamin’s writing, a worker hero who captures his productive value as a just reward for posessing a mystical spark that his comrades lack. Human users of AI are certainly not his untermensch based on a lack of that spark. But in an era where the circle of the human is being rapidly constricted by resurgent fascism, where protecting (white, male, ultra-wealthy) humanity from degeneracy is again used to justify atrocity at scale, this may seem like at best a footnote.
It is not.
Fascism needs simple aesthetics that elicit simple but intense reactions to distract and direct and radicalize. To refuse to produce or consume images that fail to provide an imaginative figure against that ground is to resist it along one of its chosen vectors of transmission. A complex and/or difficult to consume image created with AI is more resistant to fascism than a simple one created using GPUs in a slightly different way. Either image can be produced by individuals or corporations. Either can be created using data centres or laptops. It is the simplicity and content of fascist uses of AI to create propaganda images that is fascist, not the use of AI in itself.
To effectively oppose this we must untangle the ethics and the aesthetics of fascism from the romanticizations that capital uses to persuade workers to work against their own interests. We must stop confusing “work” with “works”. We must recognize that digital media is mechanical reproduction par excellence before we even start to tag its content. And we must at least read Walter Benjamin before dragging him from the grave in the service of the mystifications of one side or the other in a conflict between branches of capital over who gets to exploit creative labour.