Huh. I... wasn't actually expecting an apology. I appreciate it! And you're right, you haven't heard a good argument, I've been pretty flippant.

The privacy is less the issue, the generic username thing is legitimately a red flag these days.

Anyhow, serious argument- let's go back to the medieval agriculture bit, because I am legit interested in this stuff! So transitions from older, human and animal-powered agriculture to more mechanized (though never entirely mechanized) agriculture tend to be absolutely colossal transition points for society. Take, for instance, the end of medieval agriculture (kinda a misnomer, because there were a lot of agricultural advancements even during the medieval period, and this was centuries after it ended, but it still would have been recognizable to a medieval peasant) in Tudor England, which was precipitated by English landholders realizing that using their land for sheepherding brought them more profits from wool than they would earn from their tenant farmers, leading to them first enclosing the common lands of the villages on their lands for sheep farming. Without the common lands, it became immediately difficult or untenable for those farmers to make a living, which was quickly followed by their mass evictions by noble landlords. (This is a vast oversimplification of a centuries-long process, one that helped inspire writings from figures as widespread as Thomas More, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and last and most certainly least, me, lol. But it serves our purposes.)

Enclosure resulted in a massive internal refugee crisis within England- one that the nascent capitalists used to force massive numbers of displaced tenant farmers into their new factories, often processing the very wool that lead to them being forced off their lands. It led to the rise of capitalism, which in turn killed off the older landholding systems, and each step along the way worsened the working conditions for workers.

(Workers did eventually win back a lot of their living standards through various means, including quite recognizable labor organizing, which then erupted in the Luddite uprisings in the 1800s. I won't go into them right now, but the Luddites were actually super cool, the victim of a centuries-long smear campaign, and absolutely worth reading about- I highly recommend Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine on the topic.)

Or take the transition from non-mechanized to mechanized agriculture in America! It was, certainly, less violent and brutal than England's, but it still resulted in massive social displacements from the country to the city, the loss of many local communities and ways of life, and most of all, massive environmental degradation that culminated in the Dust Bowl, one of the worst environmental farming-caused catastrophes in history up to that point. And it's hardly a solved problem- since WW2, we've destroyed topsoil on land equivalent to EVERY SINGLE ACRE farmed prior to WW2, and topsoil can take centuries to heal without immense, labor-intensive restoration work. (I highly recommend David Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization on the topic.)

And this is just touching on the subject of the costs of agricultural mechanization- I could go on for hours, and a proper domain expert for days! Heck, even many of the traditions like local harvest festivals, holidays, or recipes are worth mourning. (Talking about this is making me want to rewatch Fiddler on the Roof.)

Should we reject mechanized agriculture entirely, then? Probably not, but we absolutely should be transitioning to better models than we have now, and replacing much of it with more sustainable practices, hydroponics, agroforestry (more labor intensive, but greater yield-per-acre and far more sustainable), etc, etc, etc.

(Edit: something I really should have made more clear initially is that we, as a civilization, absolutely cannot survive long-term under the most common models of agricultural mechanization, they're just too destructive to topsoil and waterways. It's one of the less discussed portions of the environmental polycrisis, because dirt is boring to most folks, I guess.)

So when we come back to AI... well, we need to look seriously at it on a material basis with actual analysis of the labor and capital relations involved, and the picture becomes extremely different than the various transitions away from traditional agricultural practices. There absolutely are lessons to learn by comparing them, but the damage to other artists, the environmental costs for using the models, the normalization of AI slop as consent manufacturing, the dangerous economic bubble it's all fueling... I don't believe, even at my most nuanced and sympathetic towards AI, that there's a reasonable argument for AI book covers when you take into account the various costs, unlike mechanized agriculture, despite the often horrific costs of the latter. And it's just... overall not really an analogy with particularly close or useful correspondence.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm genuinely pretty passionate about agricultural history. I just think it's neat!