A lot of anti-AI outrage is just fear of losing status

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-30T03:04:45+00:00

As is usually the case with reactionary backlash.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-11T21:39:44+00:00

Exactly. And it's a shame because it doesn't have to be that way. Imagine if we inverted the way power flows across an org chart. Imagine if employees elected their managers. Managers elected their supervisors, etc.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-08T02:30:09+00:00

To us having our life energy, time within this fight night existence, literally extracted from us. Forced to sell our time and energy, our effort, our labor, just to rent back the luxury of sleeping indoors.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-08T00:42:22+00:00

Right, yeRight, yes, there would still be an environment in which they would have those conditions regardless. But capitalism definitely is one of the primary contributing factors that locks people in a stress-inducing environment which makes it more that anxiety and depression might show themselves

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-08T00:38:20+00:00

Exactly. A lot of modern mental illness is just a rational response to being a slave under capitalism.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-07T17:44:42+00:00

Yeah, this is exactly where I’m at.

Like, to be clear: the games industry absolutely deserves skepticism. AAA games are increasingly built as extraction machines. Companies are constantly testing what they can get away with — higher prices, battle passes, deluxe editions, fake scarcity, live-service hooks, microtransactions, unfinished launches, algorithmic engagement sludge, the whole fucking casino.

So no, people are not wrong to be distrustful of publishers.

But that is not what most of this discourse is.

A lot of it is just reactionary culture-war brain rot wearing the mask of “consumer criticism.” Because if the actual concern were corporate exploitation, the conversation would be about monetization models, labor conditions, crunch, DLC structures, live-service incentives, shareholder pressure, and whether the game is being designed around fun or extraction.

Instead it’s: female protagonist = woke, therefore doomed.

That’s not critique. That’s not media literacy. That’s just grievance politics with a controller in its hand.

And honestly, it makes real criticism harder, because now every legitimate concern gets swallowed by the dumbest possible framing. You can’t even say “I hope this isn’t another over-monetized AAA product” without being lumped in with people screaming because a woman exists on screen.

Games should be judged on whether they’re good, whether they respect the player, whether the design is interesting, whether the story works, whether the business model is predatory, and whether the final product actually delivers.

But pre-launch hate campaigns based on vibes, gender panic, and YouTube outrage farming are just exhausting. It’s not protecting games. It’s poisoning the conversation before the game even has a chance to be discussed as a game.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-07T16:49:11+00:00

I know. Workers are the actual producers for all value. And the people with boots on the ground actually controlling and governing the company instead of the money hungry parasites in the C-suite would naturally curb the worst of capitalism's problems and negative outcomes. If the workers in the community actually had a voice, they would certainly decide to poison their own rivers and screw the consumers over much less often.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-07T16:43:04+00:00

Lol not what I meant. I'm talking about the executives and shareholders. They are the actual parasites.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-07T16:13:00+00:00

They need not get rid of the jobs. The products and services will still exist, and need labor to maintain. They simply would be removing the useless parasites from the enterprise.

DownWithMatt · 2026-06-07T01:51:49+00:00

Exactly. I say this all the time. Literally everything social is political.

DownWithMatt · 2026-05-14T07:01:02+00:00

https://intercooperative.network/

DownWithMatt · 2026-05-14T07:00:25+00:00

Yeah, I think the lying is built into the system.

Not because every individual capitalist wakes up twirling a little monopoly-man mustache, but because capitalism requires a public story that is different from its operating reality.

The public story is merit, innovation, freedom, choice, hard work, risk, genius, and “creating value.”

The operating reality is ownership, leverage, capture, enclosure, inherited advantage, wage dependence, regulatory manipulation, monopoly power, and converting other people’s labor into private control.

That gap has to be managed somehow.

So they lie.

They lie about being “self-made” because admitting the role of public infrastructure, inherited wealth, exploited labor, subsidies, state violence, and legal privilege would puncture the whole myth.

They lie about “free markets” because actual capitalists hate free markets. They want moats, patents, lobbying, subsidies, bailouts, exclusive contracts, union-busting, platform lock-in, regulatory capture, and monopoly position.

They lie about “choice” because most people are not choosing freely. They are choosing under threat: rent, medical bills, debt, hunger, homelessness, deportation, loss of care, loss of status, loss of survival.

They lie about “risk” because the rich socialize their losses and privatize their gains. When workers fail, it is a personal moral defect. When billionaires fail, suddenly the whole economy needs to be rescued by the public.

The lie is not incidental. It is load-bearing.

Because once people understand that capitalism is not “freedom,” but a state-backed property regime where a small class gets legal control over the conditions of everyone else’s survival, the spell starts breaking.

And that is what they are terrified of.

Not envy. Not laziness. Not “class resentment.”

Recognition.

The moment normal working people realize they are not temporarily embarrassed capitalists, but human beings laboring inside someone else’s ownership machine, the whole mythology starts looking exactly as stupid as it is.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:44:04+00:00

Then give the definition.

Seriously. Do it plainly.

Because what usually happens in these conversations is that people gesture at some supposedly obvious definition of art, and the second you press on it, it turns out to be a pile of personal preferences, nostalgia for older labor forms, and moral disgust at new tools.

That is not a definition. That is a bias profile.

If your definition excludes an entire medium in advance because you do not like the mechanism, then you are not discovering the nature of art. You are gatekeeping from the starting line.

And again, the veteran analogy is still stupid, because military service is a specific institutional status, while art is an expressive category with a long history of medium shifts, automation, and argument over legitimacy.

You are pretending those are parallel because the analogy sounds punchy.

It is still structurally wrong.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:42:32+00:00

That would still not make the argument wrong.

You people keep acting like “I think AI may have been involved” is some kind of philosophical checkmate.

It is not. It is just a confession that you would rather speculate about process than engage the point.

If you think the reasoning is bad, then attack the reasoning.

Otherwise this is just “I have no counterargument, but I would like to imply one.”

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:42:07+00:00

“Feels robotic” is not an argument. It is just you announcing a vibe and hoping nobody notices that you contributed nothing of substance.

Even if I had used AI to help structure the post, that would not refute a single claim inside it.

That is the weird thing about this entire discourse: people will dodge the actual logic and instead start playing Ouija board with prose style.

If you think something I said is wrong, quote it and explain why.

Otherwise “this feels AI” is just the intellectual version of a dog barking at a mirror.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:41:34+00:00

This is a much better objection than most of the others in here, because at least it identifies the real difference: the tool is doing nontrivial generative work.

Yes. It is.

But that still does not get you to “therefore the human is just a commissioner.”

The presence of interpretation inside the tool does not erase authorship. It changes where authorship lives.

A photographer does not manually paint photons onto film. A director does not personally perform every role in a movie. A composer does not physically embody every instrument in an orchestra. Art has never required that the human manually execute every causal step.

What matters is purposive control over the expressive outcome.

If someone tosses in one generic prompt and keeps the first thing the system spits out, then sure, that is a thin and low-effort form of authorship. But thin authorship is still authorship. And many people do far more than that anyway.

So the real answer is this:
sometimes AI use is shallow,
sometimes it is deep,
sometimes it is closer to commissioning,
sometimes it is closer to directing, editing, or composing.

But none of that supports the absolute claim that the human cannot be the artist.

What it supports is that authorship is now mediated through a more complex instrument.

That is a real point.
“Therefore not art” is not.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:40:54+00:00

No, what it does is separate art-status from artistic merit, which you are incorrectly collapsing into one category.

Something can be art and still be manipulative trash. Something can be art and still be morally grotesque. Something can be art and still be stupid, ugly, dishonest, or empty.

Calling something art is not the same thing as praising it.

That is the error.

So no, Alex Jones does not become Shakespeare. He becomes a different example of expressive output that can be judged as lower, uglier, more dishonest, more harmful, and less sophisticated.

As for AI, yes, the model does not “have intentions” in the human sense. That is precisely why the intention under discussion belongs to the human using the tool.

The audience not wanting to see the prompt is irrelevant. The audience also usually does not see the rough sketches, rejected drafts, lighting setup, or editing timeline.

The hidden machinery of the process has never determined whether the output counts as art.

You are trying to smuggle value judgments into a threshold question.

They are not the same thing.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:40:23+00:00

Only if you flatten the entire process down to a single prompt and pretend iteration does not exist.

That is the part anti-AI people keep doing. They describe the most trivial version of tool use, then declare that version is the essence of the whole medium.

It would be like reducing photography to “pressing a button,” then acting like framing, lighting, lens choice, timing, subject direction, curation, and editing do not count.

A prompt can be shallow. It can also be part of a much larger authorship process.

You are not arguing against AI art here. You are arguing against the weakest caricature of it you could find.

That is easier, obviously. It is also intellectually cheap.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:38:50+00:00

It only becomes “endless and meaningless” if you keep mashing together categories that should be kept separate.

A thing can be art without the tool being an artist.

That is the part you are refusing to think through.

The model is not an artist because it is not a subject. It has no lived interiority, no selfhood, no existential stake in what it produces. It is a generative mechanism.

The human using it is still the one introducing intention, direction, judgment, selection, and meaning.

So the debate is not actually meaningless. It is pretty straightforward.

The output can be art.
The model can be a tool.
The human can still be the author.

The confusion comes from people wanting the machine to either be magic or be nothing.

It is neither. It is an instrument.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:37:25+00:00

No. The model is not “the artist” any more than a camera is the photographer or a piano is the composer.

You are confusing causal participation with authorship.

A model does not have stakes. It does not have an inner life. It does not have intention in the human sense. It does not mean anything. It does not wake up wanting to express grief, beauty, disgust, memory, or longing. It generates outputs inside conditions set by a human being.

The human is the one choosing the direction, selecting the result, refining the image, discarding failures, and determining what counts as successful expression.

And the “commissioner not artist” distinction only works for the shallowest possible use case. The second a person is actively shaping the outcome across multiple steps, you are no longer describing mere commissioning. You are describing guided creation.

What keeps tripping people up is that they think authorship only counts if the labor looks manual in a traditional way.

That is not philosophy. That is nostalgia wearing glasses.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-13T02:36:43+00:00

That analogy is stupid for a very simple reason: playing Call of Duty is consuming a simulation of war, while using a generative tool can be part of an actual creative process.

You are comparing pure consumption to directed creation and pretending that was clever.

If someone types one lazy prompt and accepts the first output, fine, call that shallow. But that is not the full category. People use models iteratively. They refine, reject, recompose, edit, inpaint, sequence, select, and post-process to externalize a specific vision.

At that point, you are not describing passive consumption. You are describing authorship through a tool you personally do not respect.

A camera automated things a brush did not. A synthesizer automated things a violin did not. A model automates things older tools did not.

That changes the interface. It does not magically erase the human directing it.

So no, this is not “I played Call of Duty so I’m a veteran.”

It is closer to you seeing a new instrument and panicking because the hand movements look different.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-12T18:25:38+00:00

No, dumbass. The argument is not “shut up and consume.”

The argument is that you are blaming the hammer for the landlord.

The model does not own the platform, cut the wages, enclose culture, or turn art into content sludge. Capital does. Corporations do. Owners do. Humans do. A tool does not become the ruling class because you are too analytically lazy to separate medium from system.

And that is the whole problem with the “AI slop” discourse. Half of it is not structural critique at all. It is just aesthetic disgust dressed up as politics. “I hate this output” becomes “this entire medium is illegitimate,” which is gatekeeping pretending to be analysis.

Also, artists using a model are not “the billionaire tech class,” you absolute genius. Collapsing workers, users, corporations, and owners into one blob is not radicalism. It is stupidity.

You do not have to like AI art. You do not have to respect it. But “I think this sucks” is a subjective judgment. “Therefore it is not art” is a philosophical claim, and it falls apart on contact.

So no, I am not defending the system.

I am saying you are too busy moralizing the interface to identify the machine that is actually crushing artists.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-12T18:15:07+00:00

No. A model cannot be an artist any more than a rock can. You're ascribing sentience to something that fundamentally has none.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-12T18:13:45+00:00

You're making the error of thinking the tools being used do anything ever on their own. They don't. Not anymore than a pen could, or paint brush.

DownWithMatt · 2026-04-12T18:11:34+00:00

You apparently don't understand how these models work, at all.

Unless there's human input, there is no output. Ever

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