What’s happening now is very promising, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Mali now have an alliance and they’re getting support from Russia and China. Meanwhile, the US and Europe are visibly pulling back from Africa having depleted much of their resources in their proxy war with Russia.

Yeah, but have you considered that China is genociding deserts and the fossil fuel industry!

Funny there was not a single brain cell engaged in writing the parent comment.

But I’m sure thats just coincidence, right guys 🙃

They gave moon rocks to five other countries as well.

How can you even trust a source where tiny morsels of actual content aren’t obscured by layers of ads.

It’s truly remarkable to witness the liberal mind in its natural habitat, endlessly regurgitating the same tired cliches with the mechanical precision of a wind-up toy, utterly convinced of its own novelty. One might almost admire the consistency, were it not for the tragic absence of even a single original synapse firing across decades of performative enlightenment.

https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

We are so lucky to live in the enlightened west where we have so much free and unbiased media available to us unlike those oriental savages.

this comment reminds me of how people were talking about Chinese EVs a few years ago, and here you go https://www.trendforce.com/news/2025/03/10/news-chinas-homegrown-euv-machines-rumored-for-q3-trial-production-spelling-trouble-for-asml/

This is what happens when underdeveloped critical faculties are subjected to sustained saturation of propaganda. 👆

I very much agree with all that. The fear of automation is a symptom of a system that prioritizes profit over people. In a rational, equitable society, automation would be celebrated as a tool to reduce human suffering and enhance quality of life. Yet, under capitalism, it becomes a source of anxiety and inequality.

Sure but I’ve read the original post and it you don’t make a Marxist case for it.

I very much do make a Marxist case on it based on actual material and class analysis. Nice of you to cherry pick part of my argument while ignoring the rest though. Really highlights that you don’t actually want to have a discussion in good faith.

Part of creativity is what you don’t put on the canvas or write in the final draft. It’s a skill you refine through mistakes, self-reflection, and thinking really hard about the thing you’re making over the course of however many hours.

Literally the point I make here:

AI has no more volition than a camera. When I photograph a bird in a park, the artistry does not lie in the shutter button I press or the aperture I adjust, but in the years I’ve spent honing my eye to recognize the interplay of light and shadow, anticipating the tilt of a wing, sensing the split-second harmony of motion and stillness. These are the skills that allow me to capture images such as this:

If you don’t want to judge art’s value by a monetary standard, that’s absolutely fine but whether you’re describing cave art or Star Trek replicator tech the art they value is based on humanistic craftsmanship.

Nah, that’s just a straw man that you make by misrepresenting how AI is used by artists. What you claim is demonstrably false as this video that you decided not to reply to clearly demonstrates.

That nurse makes a protest poster based on a prompt. They aren’t happy with its composition or imagery. They feed ten more prompts into the plagiarism machine until one looks right.

The same way a photographer might take dozens of shots and select one they like. Furthermore, you disingenuously ignore the fact that in this scenario the goal is to create materials for agitation. An actual Marxist would immediately understand the value of such tools for worker organizing.

They won’t learn illustration from using AI for the same reason I haven’t learned physics from cheating with it, and their memoir is cheapened by weird hallucinations of what a machine looks like rather than their impression of it or a photo. The teenager in Lagos could be provided paper or image editing software to do the necessary work of thinking about each element of every frame. None of them are better off for using it.

Your whole argument here mirrors Nietzsche’s belief that art should be produced by a privileged class supported by slaves.\

If any of these use-cases were actually valid, they’d be observable in already communistic spaces like the fediverse.

And of course they are observable even despite massive trolling that creates a hostile atmosphere towards usage of AI in the fediverse. Just one example here https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7644550

Our /c/art bans all AI images outright even from the most defensible models because that comic wouldn’t be worth reading and I don’t think you would read it either.

This is a tautological argument. People who convinced themselves to hate something are banning the thing they convinced themselves to hate and using this as evidence of the thing they hate having no value. Impeccable logic on display here.

Can you actually point to one AI-generated book you’d recommend?

Oh look more straw manning. My whole argument is that AI is a tool a HUMAN uses to make things. I would certainly have no problem with a writer using LLMs to help them style their book, do proof reading, and so on. And here’s a concrete example of a book I would absolutely recommend where one of the authors, who is not a native English speaker, used LLM to help style their writing.

No, my point is that less people died overall compared to the way things were previously. It’s incredible that you’re struggling so hard to understand this. You linked wikipedia because skimming through wiki links is peak intellectual engagement for you. I’m glad to see that I won’t have to read more of your drivel going forward. Bye.

I’ve explained my argument in detail in the original post and my reply to you. I don’t see the point rehashing it again since you haven’t bothered engaging with it the first time. I’ve already explained why I disagree with the argument in the essay you linked.

but @[email protected] confidently tells me that’s not art because it was just too darn easy to produce 🤷

You’re just repeating the same tired argument I’ve already addressed above. As a Marxist, I do not see the value of art coming from how much it can be sold for. This is an intrinsically capitalist world view that you have to break out of.

I disagree with the critique because tooling around AI is already getting fairly sophisticated. Consider workflows in a tool like ComfyUI, it goes far beyond just typing in a prompt. There is a learning curve to using a tool like that, and it’s a skill just like any other.

More fundamentally, as argue in the original post, this sort of argument conflates technical skill with art. It’s stating that something becomes art merely because there’s labor involved in producing it. To me, art is fundamentally a form of expression. It’s one individual having an idea in their mind that they want to convey to others. The medium that’s used to flesh out the idea is not relevant, it’s the value of the idea itself and how it resonates with others that matters.

It’s also worth noting that slop has always been here in form of ads, Marvel movies and so on. All AI does is reduce the labor cost of producing it. I’d argue that the barrier to making good looking images being lowered means that people will have to find new ways to make art expressive beyond mere technical skill. This is similar to the way graphics in video games stopped being the defining characteristic. Often, it’s indie games with simple graphics that end up being far more interesting than a big title.

Finally, the key point I’m making is that it’s clear that this technology will continue to be developed and used going forward. So, the real question is whether we want corporations to drive its development or whether it’s better if this technology is developed in the open and community driven. The neo-luddite position ensures that the former will be the case.

Pakistan spilling the beans publicly now.

https://archive.ph/vUmBN

The US and Saudis have been trying to bomb Yemen into submission for like a decade now. It should be obvious that it’s not going to happen, and yet we see more of the same.

lol that wasn’t why it was in China in the first place, as Tim Cook explains here https://peertube.mesnumeriques.fr/w/ek3Q1mdFUMEBMxhT46Qrev