I agree. Few people seem to understand the power of intellectual property, and various critics of corporate technology either omit mentioning or openly defend intellectual property, despite corporations having monopolies being the reason enshittification is such a phenomenon in the first place.

It seems like a lot of arguments about the role of technology in society instead boil down to more-stuffism vs. less-stuffism, usually based on emotionally charged preference for modern aesthetics or how much they believe the noble savage/appeal to nature fallacies.

When it comes to AI for instance, anyone reasonable can see that if it’s open sourced for everyone to use then it’s just a simple common good like a public library, use it (responsibly) and there’s no issue.

Closed source private models in use by corporations suck up the environment (which belongs to everyone) and use the capital they steal from wage workers who actually produce the things they sell to give themselves leverage over said consumers/workers and other corporations, and this is not fair to the 99%.

Picture a world where AI is good enough to where it actually provides value to use it in a good chunk of jobs, and the best AI is corporate and closed source, and they just enshittified it and jacked up the prices, but if you want to get a job, you better know how to use it well. It would mean that corpo has an enormous power over your life now and you got little choice but to pony up, and they can raise prices whenever they want and snowball that capital into more and more.

I think the reason in this instance is that a lot of artists are bourgeoisie themselves and they understand that. They may be progressive as a personality strait/gimmick/style and talk about “empathy” but they understand the material reality of things.

They had the opportunities and the room for failure necessary to go into such a high risk field, and their ultimate form of commercial success is essentially using that privilege to create intellectual property they could make money from, hence the “concerns” over “style theft” and moralist fearmongering over vaguely defined concepts like “soulless”, which is usually as arbitrary as “white” for racists (not implying equivalence here).

I find generally that a lot of the anti-AI viewpoints are simple self-serving veils of bourgeoisie who’s capital is threatened, no different from the culture war fearmongering about vaping, a dying grasp of the tobacco companies of old threatened by shenzen gadget slop factories, hoping people would go back to cigarettes or non-vape alternatives like Iqos that they conveniently will sell you.