Because capitalism orients people toward profit rather than allowing us to pursue our interests freely, it inevitably separates humans from the creative act. AI art is just the slop frothing up from that gap.
There was a time when people imagined AI’s final form as a great metallic beast with malice in its mind — or, perhaps more realistically, as an unseen yet limitless network of accumulated knowledge that could render humanity obsolete simply by outperforming it. There’s something idealistic about those apocalyptic visions, some latent optimism in the belief that our destruction will emerge from a fair fight against a worthy foe created by the hubris of those with money and capital.
But reality is often disappointing. Generative AI is just as cruel as some had feared — it destroys workers’ livelihoods, swallows up tons of water, and spews pollution into the air. But its output is twisted, soulless gibberish — videos of a cat with suspiciously human-looking hands planting bombs on the heads of other animals, an X account gleefully announcing “her” latest recovery from cancer roughly once every six hours, an Israel-commissioned image of a reconstructed Gaza, sanitized of its Palestinian past and people, serrated with rows of gleaming glass towers. Whether it is made to manipulate emotions or justify a genocide, AI cannot hide its weird incompetence: an oily sheen draws out sickeningly vivid colors; appendages appear and disappear; scenes of simple joy are unintentionally rendered in grotesque, grimacing swirls of beaks, teeth, and fur.
Nevertheless, some remain enamored with generative AI. What they lack in taste, they make up for in…
Auteur: Nicholas Liu
