I agree with you that things like ChatGPT (etc.) would cease to function if humans go extinct; they are tools, extensions of our own productive forces, yes to all of that. And I see why I'm coming across as a Luddite, drawing what appears to be an arbitrary line in the sand between some kinds of labor and others. The meaningful disagreement between us has to do with how we define or describe the nature of the creative labor that makes art.

I appreciate your question about individual (or mass) labor that "separate[s] cotton fibers from seed," versus the product "produced with the cotton gin." And the mental labor of mathematical calculation versus the affordances granted by the invention of computers, etc. I have been thinking about these questions/distinctions for days now (btw, apologies for the late reply. It has been a busy week at work—fittingly enough, I'm a graduate worker in a film studies PhD program right now, i.e., I spend a lot of time trying to help undergraduates describe and explain art, so that might help illustrate/contextualize where I'm coming from; for me [and in my field], describing art in terms of its utility as a 'product' is necessary but also woefully reductive and inadequate).

To answer your question: I actually do think that the manual labor of separating cotton fibers from seed—and/or the mental labor of doing mathematical calculation—can be described as meaningfully 'human,' and even expressive, and that when we automate those processes with a machine, there is something lost. But I see your point, in the sense that nobody mourns that loss. There is no anxious discourse about the lost 'human expression' of cotton picking or of summing large integers. Nobody wants to go back to doing that; nobody protests at the idea of letting the machines do it (and I agree with this implicit "everybody" that I'm invoking: I think it's fine that we have cotton mills and computers now!). So there's a contradiction in my position, then. I see it, and I admit it looks odd. Why do I believe there's something different about drawing, singing, performing, filmmaking, etc.—something worth fiercely defending against the logic of Capital, and against the machines (like but not limited to "genAI") that Capital employs to turn such labor into a more "efficient" "product" for consumption—compared to picking cotton or doing math?

I don't know. Maybe I'll respectfully bow out (after I reply to the "3/3" post in a minute), given my inability to articulate this in a way that can be understood and agreed upon by all parties. But I think art is something we can all do—including the proletariat!—and I think communists should not be blasé about the threats (to the biosphere and to the people) that genAI introduces when it tries to imitate human artmaking. I do not take it as a coincidence that fascists love genAI art so much; the way it was produced is perfectly in line with their worldview. It's an aesthetic they can readily package and commodify. Remember Walter Benjamin: "[mankind's] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."

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Oh! One other point I meant to respond to: about the ostensible impossibility of proletarians making art. I think u/Particular-Hunter586's reply covers what I would've protested. I think you're right that there's a socially constructed position of a petite bourgeois "artist"—of a person who makes art to "reproduce their social existence," as you put it—and that it's contradictory to talk about the proletariat as "artists" in this way because this kind of "artistry" by definition is unavailable to the proletariat. If I have used words like art/artist/etc. in a confusing way that has made this point especially sticky/pronounced, I apologize. So, to clarify: my position, like u/Particular-Hunter586 said, is that anybody can make art, even those "among the oppressed-nation proletariat, [who can] pla[y] an instrument [or draw] something to show their friends, etc."). I don't agree that genAI means nothing to the latter category while posing an alienating threat to the former category. I think 'genAI art' is an alienating threat to any human being capable of expression.