This might be relevant for following ICE around or direct action, but at this point there’s almost zero personal risk from attending something like a rally or a march.

My relatives and even friends my age are afraid to go to protests. They read stuff like this, and it acts as demobilization messaging. In my experience, once you get them to go once they’re no longer afraid to engage, but there’s an initial fear and anticipatory obedience that has to be overcome.

inb4 protests do nothing: getting people to stick their toe in the water helps build commitment that will one day be necessary to gain critical mass for more organized disobedience.

Thanks for following up. I am glad your friends still made their own song. I think AI as a conceptual tool is a more constructive application of the technology than AI as a direct generator of art.

Personally, I make things and am an artist as well. I don’t think AI can directly replace what I do or what others in my field do with any satisfaction, but it can devalue the market in which I produce substantially and increase entropy and imitations to the point where signal from noise becomes harder to discern.

🤷 Let’s hear it.

With the amount of energy put into GenAI and the sheer bulk of content generated, why don’t advocates have at least one example of something artistically interesting, unique, or beautiful to showcase their claims? Has it yet made anything of cultural importance that will illicit more than a chuckle and a ‘like’?

It seems to me I keep hearing non-artists assert that this will be a great thing for art, while real artists who disagree are labeled Luddites or not genuinely creative in some way. It’s frustrating to watch them openly say easily disprovable things. This isn’t speculative anymore these systems have been in production for years at this point. Let’s look at the actual results.