I’ve noticed every chud grifter and politician (same thing, am I right? HAW HAW dad joke owl) seems to use AI art. For memes, for video thumbnails, for their dumb articles that only your 60 year old estranged relative reads, for their shitty Twitter “gotchas”. They love that shit. The uglier the AI generated slop is the better. Why do you think that is? Lack of talent? Hatred of artists? What drives this love of poor quality?
Fascists have always hated art and artists. Art is open to interpretation; fascists can’t tolerate ambiguity. Art invites uncomfortable questions; fascists demand easy answers that justify their worst impulses. Art captures the messy and complicated nature of life; fascists insist on a black-and-white world where they’re ontologically good and their enemies are ontologically evil. Art involves the artist baring their soul to the world; fascists view vulnerability as a cardinal sin.
To the fascist, the dull and shallow nature of AI art isn’t a bug, but a feature. Image generators produce exactly what is demanded of them without any deeper meaning or nuance, which is what fascism demands of art and artists to the extent that it permits them to exist at all. If you look at the actual art fascists have produced - from the sentimental pablum of the Third Reich to modern trash like Pureflix films - it’s eerily similar to the dead-eyed, lifeless nature of AI content.
Booooooooooooo. I didn’t know “Pureflix” existed but now I do. Boooooooooooo
I thought that was the censored Mormon movie rental service, but that was Cleanflicks.
My answer was going to be that they hate not only artists but art itself. Like they wanted Princess Mononoke to end with Ashitaka not getting infected 10 minutes in and that be that.
I honestly believe that they need the whole world to support their vision of masculinity. I think some portion of imperial violence is unrelated to material conditions and solely in service of feeling dominant and expressing a heirarchy for the sake of being on top of it. Like if Chad and Soyjak were around in the 1940s, Hitler would have been sated and WW2 would have been pushed back a year.
I would assert that it’s part of being a death cult. I’ve moved away from “I get it, the European mountain town is probably really cozy.” They would never be content. In the ethnostate, someone’s child is going to sneak off to the neighboring village that is a little less hardline and bring back a dreamcatcher that a cute girl made. Someone will subsequently be visibly gay, they’ll blame it on" ${{slur}}-art," and suddenly the cycle of violence begins anew. Their world must be in service of an antiquated, unsustainable vision of masculinity that is incompatible with the curious mind that art nourishes.
It might also apply to the natural sciences, by the way. You can like the cosmos or the body, but not too much. The size and physics of the cosmos interfere with a specific vision of a patriarchal diety. The immune system and it’s coexistence with bacteria and viruses requires too much consideration of society. These things cannot supercede the drive to control and partician others.
You’re right, but socialist realism was pretty moralistic and one sided too, and used for a similar purpose.
I think it’s not that deep - it’s just cheap, and does what it needs to do. It’s the bare minimum that gets the goods, and that’s all capitalist design philosophy is.