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Comment by pwillia7 | Hacker News Reader

Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

You see it obviously with the artists and image/video generators too.

We did this with Dadaism and Impressionism and photography before this too with art.

Ultimately, it's just more abstraction that we have to get used to -- art is stuff people create with their human expression.

It is funny to see everyone argue so vehemently without any interest in the same arguments that happened in the past.

Exit through the giftshop is a good movie that explores that topic too, though with near-plagiarized mass production, not LLMs, but I guess that's pretty similar too!

https://daily.jstor.org/when-photography-was-not-art/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqVXThss1z4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dada

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> Just normal Luddite things, which attracts those most threatened in their personal identity by the new technology.

I feel like “Luddite” is a misunderstood term.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

> Malcolm L. Thomas argued in his 1970 history The Luddites that machine-breaking was one of the very few tactics that workers could use to increase pressure on employers, undermine lower-paid competing workers, and create solidarity among workers. "These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made." [emph. added] Historian Eric Hobsbawm has called their machine wrecking "collective bargaining by riot", which had been a tactic used in Britain since the Restoration because manufactories were scattered throughout the country, and that made it impractical to hold large-scale strikes. An agricultural variant of Luddism occurred during the widespread Swing Riots of 1830 in southern and eastern England, centring on breaking threshing machines.

Luddites were closer to “class struggle by other means” than “identity politics.”

I mean, luddites have consistently been correct. Technological advancements have consistently been used to benefit the rich at the expense of regular people.

The early Industrial Revolution that the original Luddites objected to resulted in horrible working conditions and a power shift from artisans to factory workers.

Dadism was a reaction to WWI where the aristocracy's greed and petty squabbling led to 17 million deaths.

I don't disagree with that, just that there's anything that can be done about it. Which technology did we successfully roll back? Nukes are the closest I think you can get and those are very hard to make and still exist in abundance, we just somewhat controlled who can have them

> Which technology did we successfully roll back?

Quite a few come to mind: chemical and biological weapons, beanie babies, NFTs, garbage pail kids... Some take real effort to eradicate, some die out when people get bored and move on.

Today's version of "AI," i.e. large language models for emitting code, is on the level of fast fashion. It's novel and surprising that you can get a shirt for $5, then you realize that it's made in a sweatshop, and it falls apart after a few washings. There will always be a market for low-quality clothes, but they aren't "disrupting non-nudity."

Chemical weapons still exist and are used[1]

So are beanie babies, NFTs and garbage pail kids -- Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology. I think that's part of the difficulty, how could you roll back knowledge without some Khmer Rouge generational trauma?

I think about the original use of steam engines and the industrial revolution -- Steam engines were so inefficient, their use didn't make sense outside of pulling its own fuel out of the ground -- Many people said haha look how silly and inefficient this robot labor is. We can see how that all turned out.[2]

1: https://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/timeline-syrian-chemi...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine

> Things that have fallen out of fashion isn't the same thing as eradicating a technology.

That's true. Ruby still exists, for example, though it's sitting down below COBOL on the Tiobe index. There's probably a community trading garbage pail kids on Facebook Marketplace as well. Ideas rarely die completely.

Burning fossil fuels to turn heat into kinetic energy is genuinely better than using draft animals or human slaves. Creating worse code (or worse clothing) for less money is a tradeoff that only works for some situations.

It's not about "rolling back" technology it's about democratizing its benefit

This guy's knowledge of art history is the Dada wikipedia page and the Banksy movie from 20 years ago.

Allow me to repeat myself: AI is for idiots.

gottem Jenny

Since you're a real established artist, I want to make my point more clear: I am not an artist and while AI image tools let me make fun pictures and not be reliant on artists for projects, it doesn't imbue me with the creativity to create artistic works that _move_ people or comment on our society. AI doesn't give or take that from you, and I argue that is what truly separates art and artists from doodles and doodlers.

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