From: bencollver@tilde.pink   
      
   AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism   
   =================================   
   February 9, 2025   
   Gareth Watkins   
      
   It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art   
   is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.   
      
   Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on   
   D-Day. Britain First's co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men   
   laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song   
   combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it   
   into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify's   
   global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an   
   ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally   
   ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer's Labour Party posts, then is forced to   
   take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic   
   animals. A few days later, they promised to "mainline AI into the   
   veins" of Britain.   
      
   The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of   
   the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy,   
   disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents   
   having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression,   
   right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year   
   posters to 'terrorwave'. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To   
   understand it, we must consider the right's hatred of working people,   
   its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily,   
   its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem   
   like a stretch, but bear with me.   
      
   The first point is the most obvious. 'AI'–-as embodied by large   
   language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image   
   generators like DALL-E and Midjourney–-promises to make anyone who   
   can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic   
   designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and   
   often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit   
   to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The   
   selling point is that their users don't have to pay (and, more   
   importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them,   
   but upon whose technical skills they'd be forced to depend. For   
   relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time   
   graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of   
   crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an   
   unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of   
   marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to   
   get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that,   
   when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their   
   utter contempt for labour?   
      
   For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not   
   a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw   
   attention to its artificiality--think the mass-produced modernism of   
   the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned),   
   or the music of Kraftwerk--AI art pretends to realism. It can produce   
   art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless   
   Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the   
   reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without   
   the need for artists.   
      
   Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants   
   Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly   
   young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he   
   induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to   
   signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his   
   chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for   
   the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram   
   followers.   
      
   Companies can't launch a new AI venture without their customers   
   telling them, clearly, "nobody wants this."   
      
   On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also   
   be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the   
   rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. 'Zuck' was   
   even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald   
   Trump. (It's worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right   
   he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to   
   later.) But even Zuck can't make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake   
   profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six   
   months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had   
   Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears   
   to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored   
   but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need   
   (cf: Microsoft's Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the   
   technology just isn't there. Companies can't launch a new AI venture   
   without their customers telling them, clearly, "nobody wants   
   this."   
      
   And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as   
   a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according   
   to Goldman Sachs--a figure calculated before the Trump administration   
   pledged a further $500 billion for its 'Project Stargate'. While   
   previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn't pay off, their bet on   
   cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly--$3.44 trillion dollars, at   
   the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air.   
   All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political   
   right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the   
   far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency   
   almost exclusively. This isn't just about utility, it's about   
   aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their   
   adoption of AI.   
      
   OpenAI is unable to make money on $200 subscriptions to ChatGPT.   
   Goldman Sachs cannot see any justification for its level of   
   investment. Sam Altman is subject to allegations of sexually abusing   
   his sister. 'Slop' was very nearly word of the year. And then, to top   
   it all off, the open-source DeepSeek project, developed in China,   
   wiped $1 trillion off the US stock market overnight.   
      
   In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the   
   allies it can get. And it can't afford to be picky. If the only   
   places that people are seeing AI imagery is @BasedEphebophile1488's   
   verified X account--well, at least it's being used at all. The   
   thinking seems to be that, if it can hang on long enough in the   
   public consciousness, then, like cryptocurrency before it, AI will   
   become 'too big to fail'. Political actors like Tommy Robinson won't   
   be the ones to make that call, but they can normalise its use, and   
   Robinson certainly moves in the digital circles of people who can   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-DOS v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)