In my opinion, AI just feels like the logical next step for capitalist exploitation and destruction of culture. Generative AI is (in most cases) just a fancy way for cooperations to steal art on a scale, that hasn’t been possible before. And then they use AI to fill the internet with slop and misinformation and actual artists are getting fired from their jobs, because the company replaces them with an AI, that was trained on their original art. Because of these reasons and some others, it just feels wrong to me, to be using AI in such a manner, when this community should be about inclusion and kindness. Wouldn’t it be much cooler, if we commissioned an actual artist for the banner or find a nice existing artwork (where the licence fits, of course)? I would love to hear your thoughts!
I’m one of them. I went from thinking naively that consumer politics matter to leaving my career to fight big tech, unionize tech workers, and for a year or so I’ve also worked on limiting the harm of generative AI specifically.
If I thought this petty stuff would do anything, I would have probably wasted a lot of time in the wrong hole.
The use of AI images without critique communicates to people that these things are normal and fine and inevitable and non-harmful. This isn’t about staging a ‘consumer boycott’ in terms of harming profits as much as it’s about not normalizing this kind of stuff culturally. The less acceptable this stuff is, the more likely people will be willing to push back against big tech more generally. It’s part of the same movement.
And it’s additive, not zero-sum. No one is saying “don’t bother unionizing” because they’re too busy pushing back on the use of AI images in an online community. In fact, I’d reckon, the broad societal pushback makes it more likely that people will be inspired to unionize!
In my experience it is the total opposite: the habit of individual, culturally-oriented actions cultivates a normalization of symbolic, small-scale actions and prevents people to develop a taster for collective action. Once they hit the limit of what they can do alone in the cultural sphere, instead of asking themselves how to overcome these limits, they just ignore collective forms of action to keep repeating the same individualistic and symbolic actions. Most people who show up and take initiative in collective efforts almost always have no history of engaging with symbolic actions and emancipating themselves from that mindset. There are a few, but it’s by far the exception.