Leftist AI art in a dystopian world
I have a nuanced view of AI. The story is oversimplified in social media discourse. The water use of each ChatGPT query turned out to be lower than the numbers that were initially spread around online. The new crop of college students are using PDF to brainrot AI webapps because their attention spans are cooked. The younger professors who know they'll cheat anyways want them to consult Answers AI to absorb the material. These kids are that illiterate. Older professors find out they all have perfectly written essays because of the Answers AI and yell at them for being lazy. Old man thinks the youth don't want to work anymore, tale as old as time. Teenagers are starting to date by roleplaying with the Character AI chatbots, instead of the awkward flings with classmates. We may have reached the point where these kids are too anxious to message their online crush on Discord.
AI art showed up as propaganda in the Ukraine invasion and Palestinian genocide. If you haven't tried ChatGPT or Midjourney once, you've disengaged from the zeitgeist. If you're a millennial, you've failed to fully apprehend and utilize the one thing our generation is thought to be proficient at: the computer.
If left-luddites were serious about their dissent for AI art, we would have seen news of an AI datacenter firebombing.
Time Magazine even let “AI alignment researcher” Eliezer Yudkowsky write an op-ed that suggests destroying the dark satanic server mills back in 2023.
But no, fursona Photoshop artists who are the most vehement online never leave the house. They rely on their high technology Wacom tablets. They use Clip Studio Paint instead of Photoshop, either because they're broke, or as a protest against Adobe's AI intrusions. No matter how loud they yell into the digital void, the AI arms race will continue. The artist Daniel Keller has coined the word sloptimism for enjoying the takeover of AI slop videos on every social media app. I tap all the insane AI content he shares to his Instagram Stories to steer my Reels FYP towards it as well. I'm a sloptimist and a technologist too. Though the humanoid AI robots and robot dogs do worry me a bit. Here's the extent of the robotic uncanny valley currently:
Once the breakthrough of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) arrives, capitalists will plant it in humanoid robots' brains. They're already cooking up crazy experiments with GPT-4o robots. With the coming proliferation of AI agents that are skilled at computer use, replacing office workers, 95% of the jobs disappear. Sadly we ain't getting fully automated luxury communism or universal basic income either.
Us left accelerationists were too optimistic in the mid 2010s. I supported Andrew Yang instead of Bernie Sanders in the 2020 presidential election. Bernie seemed too old with that heart attack, and Yang wanted to give us the Neetbux we deserved. The left and right criticized him for different reasons. If we achieved the $1000 a month Freedom Dividend in 2021, we could raise it to keep up with cost of living, and this country would be better off now. But here in 2025, the wealth stratification between rich and poor is greater than ever before. We have horrors of Palestine protestors and peaceful Latinos disappeared to the nightmare CECOT prison in El Salvador.
And homeless people's flesh rotting off from tranq.
And their dying of fentanyl overdoses, unreported murders, and rape on the streets. We all look away, because it makes us sad to consider them as human beings. Fox News paints them as enemy number one in San Francisco. If only we could give them that Freedom Dividend, a subsidized room in all those vacant houses Blackrock subsidiaries hoard, and a social worker to re-integrate them.
Let's put a pin in that bleak reality, and move towards the light. Here's a video I painstakingly made with a Style Transfer AI and After Effects in 2022 that's real art.
I was early to this stuff. I began with Artbreeder in 2020. I stumbled upon it during the COVID lockdown and quickly became addicted. I also trained custom StyleGAN models to make custom visuals, well past its expiration date. It was a lot of fucking work to execute the trippy visions. Here's another masterpiece including StyleGAN morphing and much more, in just 14 seconds.
I kept progressing, quickly adopting the forefront of AI techniques, despite my preference for the glitchy and lo-res AI art programs of 2020-21. I made this biblically accurate angel piece with a complicated Stable Diffusion, Photoshop, and After Effects process in 2023. This was a plateau for me.
I then quit making AI art for over a year. I had new concerns about the ethics of it. Now I've come around, and absolutely need to generate AI videos again for ambitious creative visions. Recently I had a funny idea of a coming neo-futurist art movement. I kicked it off with a video spelling the vibe out in the backyard. Then quickly made another lighting an AI generated family portrait of Elon Musk on fire.
I listened to the QAA podcast with one of my favorite writers Ryan Broderick recently. Ryan said that the AI art used and abused by Trump, Vance, and the AfD party in Germany IS our 2020s futurism. The original futurists in Italy were fascists too, after all.
I'll admit, there is malicious AI art. Thus there's no way of getting through to the artists who hate it all. They portray themselves as the new luddites while being cripplingly addicted to their phones. Those devices containing cobalt mined by Congolese child slaves and assembled in Foxconn factories that needed suicide nets for the workers.
I have a friend Aaron Ackerson who was a fan of my old AI art visuals on TikTok. He's also an AI artist, has a longer career as a musician, and streams on Twitch. Normally he's a sweet guy. He was so hurt, or maddened by the digital artists' hate comments under his posts, and their death threats in his Twitter DMs, that he had to create this strange song and music video.
I've made weird and creepy art and music too, I can't really hate. Occasionally I try to change minds and fail too. I couldn't stomach waging the culture war as much as I ascertain that Aaron has.
That's my most recent mixed media collage.
My friend Matt and I started a new, bigger project that utilizes multimodal generative AI. It's an intellectual brainrot page called Atom Rainer. Matt is fundamental to this. He came up with the name. He told me he wanted to start a philosophical AI slop page, and I jumped on that quicker. He'll be contributing after finishing a DIY construction project at his family's property. This is my favorite video that I've slapped together so far.
Matt and I only met once at a DIY noise music show in San Diego back in 2019. We later found out we have other similar interests, creative practices, and political beliefs. We've now amassed 2-3 years of text conversations, totaling 175 pages, about continental philosophy, AI, neofeudalism, leftist politics, and societal collapse to draw from for the videos. In summer 2024, we formed a group chat with three other writer friends to release a printed zine together. That didn't materialize. If the short form videos take off, we will gather the full team to transition the Atom Rainer project into long form content, a blog, and said zine.
But wait, there's more! Funnily enough, I'm actually mutuals with Billy Mays III, Billy Mays' son. He used AI art for his post-metal project, and he liked the AI art visuals I posted on TikTok. Anyways, I recently generated an AI image in Hailuo for this oxymoron of a statement shirt.
It's idiosyncratic to me, but if you want to purchase one to support my work, it is for sale
That included a hiking trail that was also an active construction site, an overpriced cafe where I had a nice chat with an elderly man, and the 7 Eleven where I bought two dirty homeless guys lunch. More pedestrians and homeless people in the area glanced at it confusedly. The point of the shirt is to be seen IRL and make people think. I'll take more emo survivalist fit pics with it too. The origin of the message was personal to some graffiti artist I'll never meet, and now deepfaked into a shirt.
The scary wildfire background choice is because I'm from Southern California. I experienced those climate disasters from childhood in the 2000s, to being in a cabin a few blocks away from a 3 acre wildfire in 2017. In the 2020s I've driven through wildfire smoke, red skies, and leveled forests. I've had quite the solastalgia from that all. I don't want to hear the “AI is bad for the environment” refrain anymore. We're too late to stop the climate collapse anyways. It has arrived in full force.
The “muh climate change” is posted by the same people who buy vegan leather boots (plastic), vinyl records (plastic), Funko pops (plastic), commute by car, and fly to Berlin for art showings. In America you must use oil. We each are responsible for more carbon emissions every week than a lifetime of ChatGPT queries. And not enough people consider that plastic is derived from oil. Anything we say about fighting climate change is at odds with our consumer behavior. Sure, there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, but America does more damage than the rest of the world as the Treatlerites that we are. Conspicuous consumption plagues the left just the same. I fall into showing off my purchases on Stories too. A life of capitalist indoctrination will always guide us back to that hedonic treadmill of buying more and more.
There is something else you can do. If you've read to the end, you might be amenable to this already. The left needs to generate AI art and chat with LLMs as protest, propaganda, and educational tools.
Some of my smarter leftist friends are AI users already. These bots speed up the production of subversive materials. ChatGPT will engage with far left ideas, strengthen your arguments, and nail down your exact ideology.
Fascism is already here. Wouldn't you like to see a communist revolution enabled by AI? New activists don't have time to learn to draw now, get generating comrades.
I'll leave you with one more thinker of a tweet. This might inspire another post.
