Luddites and AI Art

There is a common misconception about "Luddites" that I feel is particularly applicable to the discourse on AI art.

Steven Zapata's The End of Art: An Argument Against Image AIs is one of the pieces that has stuck with me the most, and one that I feel most closely alignes with my views. I forget exactly where I found this video -- possibly linked to me elsewhere on a social media feed, or maybe just recommended to me by (gasp!) an algorithm.

In it, Steven breaks down common narratives from proponents of AI art and why they are inaccurate to the technologies in play. This article was originally a comment underneath that video that I wanted to archive here. Although if I wrote it now, I might personally lean away from arguments about "copyrights" -- I think that is less like a double-edged sword and more like a bi-directional shotgun, in terms of viability in defending the art space from grifters -- but I wanted a place to save and reference this.

[21:36] It's ridiculous to call someone like me a luddite, and I have never resisted tools. I have spent my whole career joyfully trying out every new tool that shows up. [...22:17] I don't use any of these tools begrudgingly; it has been a joy to learn them and play with them and I only want more of these things, not less. And I know many of the artists who are resisting the AIs like me are voracious lovers of advancement and new ways to create. No, I'm not a luddite and I'm not afraid of new tools. I can just tell what is a tool and what is a replacement.

This isn't what a Luddite is! A pop-culture understanding of "luddites" is that they are opposed to new technologies and tools, but this narrative is so far removed from the actual Luddites, who were highly skilled textile workers in the textile industry in 19th century Britain. They deeply understood the machines they supposedly were "afraid" of. In the middle of poverty, food scarcity, and high unemployment, the owning class were replacing these workers with machines (wide frames) that could be operated with the less-skilled labor of 'colts' (cheaper workers, typically apprentices, the unapprenticed, and women). These frames also really sucked and made terrible products (cut-ups), which damaged the reputation of the textile industry as a whole. Organized strikes were difficult at the time due to scattered manufacturing. On March 11, 1811, British troops broke up a crowd of protesters in Nottingham who were demanding better wages and abandoning the use of wide frames and the crappy cut-ups they made. Later that night, workers assembled just outside Nottingham in Arnold and started destroying the frames.

This attitude caught on among textile workers in nearby towns, and escalated over the coming months and years. There is a rich history here I intend to read more about. One thing I want to note is that not even a month later, Nottingham Corporation started producing a handbill (basically a flyer) offering £50 for information about the "evil minded persons" who "assembled together in a riotous manner" to destroy the frames. In the Annual Register, 1812, p 385, the Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords on the Disturbed State of certain Counties, notes:

The disposition to combined and disciplined riot and disturbance [...] seems to have been first manifested in the neighborhood of Nottingham [...] by the destruction of a great number of newly invented stocking-frames, by small parties of men, principally stocking weavers [...] This spirit of discontent (amongst other causes to which it has been attributed) was supposed to have been excited or called into action by the use of a new machine, which enabled the manufacturers to employ women in work which men had been before employed [...]

And J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond note in The Skilled Laborer, 1919:

A curious advertisement in the Nottingham Journal for February 1, 1812 [Home > Office, 42/120, available at the National Archives], throws some light on the relations between masters and frame-breakers. An employer, C. Shipley, explains that he has not removed to Mansfield in order to set the trade at defiance, or to make unlawful work, but simply because he has heard that the men intended to break all lace frames in country villages 'without regard to what they were making.' He regrets the false reports, assures them that he is stopping the obnoxious work, and hopes that they will offer him no further violence.

There's more here, and looking at that cited Home Office papers reveal a lot more about the contemporary attitudes about the riots.

I read this as an attempt to, in part, control the narrative of the protesting/rioting, and the beginning of this whitewashed, apolitical, technophobic popular understanding of a working class movement. But the reason I bring it up is because this kind of rewriting is exactly what I see happening to people and artists blowing the whistle about AI art. What it's not about is "artists being afraid of technology", or philosophic quibbles about the definition of art, or the projected quality of future output by AI, but about artist's rights and copyrights, the nonprofit-and-academic-industrial complex, and the increasingly-total takeover of the art space and all rights within it by corporations using AI art to displace and undermine working artists in the here and now.