Authors and artists are currently dismayed that AI is replacing them. More and more books are coming out that are AI copies of their own books and artworks on Amazon.
So what are they doing against this. Do they vow to boycott Amazon and stop selling on the retail giant known for countless labor violations?
No, instead they blame AI and “people who use AI” (whatever that means). It’s simple not to use AI, they say: learn to draw. Learn to write. Learn to code. Learn to organize your own messy thoughts. Learn to read through the lines. Learn geopolitics. Learn photography. Learn five more jobs.
And perhaps in 20 years from now you can start actually living. People were not learning to draw before AI; they gave up if what they wanted did not exist. Not everybody is going to invest their free time into your hobby.
It’s pretty blatant that this is the reckoning of a class of people, the ‘artisans’, with the reality that the skill they thought would never be automated… is getting automated. This is not speaking on quality, output volume, etc. Without any qualitative qualifiers needed, their work is objectively getting automated. And they are lashing out.
But they sold their work on Amazon for years without complaints, even as the drivers who deliver their physical copies pass out at the wheel from being overworked and not having access to A/C.
I put artisan in quotes because it reveals what they are: the petite-bourgeoisie. Most of them are not socialists in any way, they only care about their profits. The fact that they work mostly by themselves, or as freelance authors (delivering a book to a publisher who then handles the rest of the process, e.g. printing, marketing) doesn’t change their class nature.
Even as Amazon itself is investing in AI, like all tech giants, they are still selling on the platform. They will sooner abandon their values than their profits.
I could say more, but it would be a pale copy of this essay: https://polclarissou.com/boudoir/posts/2023-02-03-Artisanal-Intelligence.html, and I couldn’t do it justice. You should read it.
I will leave you with what prompted me to make this quick write-up:
Taking his own books off Amazon doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. He sees the sales numbers on the copies and thinks, each one of those is a lost customer.
Artisans that own their own means of production and produce at their own behest, but must perform this labor themselves, are petite-bourgeoisie. They are not bourgeoisie proper, but they live by their own labor and means of production. They are constantly at risk of proletarianization, because they generally can’t compete with the bourgeoisie proper, but they as a class are generally more assured than the proletariat. Obviously edge-cases exist, but as a class this is generally true.
This petite-bourgeois relation is why as a profession it is more common to become mega-wealthy than, say, the upper-paid skilled proletarians like doctors or engineers, even if those skilled proletarians have it better on average. Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, J. K. Rowling, etc. all made their vast wealth from royalties, because they own the IP they created. It isn’t a proletarian wage that they recieve, they have a different class character than proletarians.
Now, the merits/demerits of AI is a different question, but if your only objection is to the correct identification of artisans as petite-bourgeoisie then that should settle that critique.
It’s no secret that people get into writing to get rich and unalienated. It’s the dream of every writer to live in a secluded mansion just writing books all day ala Stephen King and sending that off to a publisher who just says “yessir we’re sending it to print right now”. I doubt many would ever accept salary work for it even if it was in socialism.
That tension between proletarianization and the dreams of being one of the “greats” is the basis of the modern desparation of the artisinal worker. I do think that in socialism, at least higher stages of socislism, artists would return to being “happy” as a subsection of the proletariat. George Lucas expressed jealousy over soviet filmmakers and their freedom from the profit motive, after all.
Yeah, as a hobbyist writer I’ve heard that a lot, and like… for me, it is way more ‘complete’ in terms of the creative work on my works if I’m out and about with the proletariat, working the salary, experiencing the same they do, even if it’s like fantasy fiction, I can’t explain why I feel this way but if I ever get ‘serious’ I wouldn’t want more than getting my needs met and maybe some repairs/cleaning in my home and stuff I own once in a while.