It’s a form of productive capital, and its ethicality depends entirely on the conditions and reasons for its use, same as any other. Renting time on a proprietary model is unethical, because that represents a modern enclosure of the cultural commons. Capital replacing skilled workers with generative slop is unethical, because it’s yet another step in automating away productive workers with inferior machines.

Hobbyists and yeoman artists using non-proprietary local models to amplify their own labor is ethical, because that’s just a worker using a tool to be able to accomplish more, while existing as much as possible outside of the cultural enclosure techbros are trying to make.

The question of whether training data has to be properly licensed from someone who claims the rights to do so is a red herring meant to favor huge corporations that either own massive amounts of IP (like Disney and other media companies) or which claim licensing rights over massive amounts of user-provided IP (like , imgur, instagram, etc) and who can negotiate licensing fees out of the big tech companies like what got from google. The property angle will never come out in favor of small yeoman artists and their meager holdings any more than property rights came out in favor of yeoman farmers over huge agricorps, and thus should be disregarded.

That said, the hobbyist AI community is at least 95% irredeemable and better off in , from the grifters, to the nazis, to the nonces, to the people whose only crime is just being too cringe.

There is no “ethical” evaluation of AI under Marxism. It’s clear that AI is merely a tool, like all other forms of automation, to displace workers for the sake of profits. AI isn’t “Good” or “Bad” in this context. Under the constraints of capitalism, it will be used for “Bad” things, meaning “non-productive” things. Sold as a toy to users to perform whatever they desire, creating nonsense text and images that ultimately have no value. AI could be a truly transformative technology if it was confined to a more socially responsible system. It’s use in protein identification, for example, is a real leap forward.

Also, like so many “revolutionary” technologies, you’ll see capitalists bend over backwards to add “AI” to whatever it is they produce. That’s how you get bullshit like the “AI” mouse, or the “AI” tooth brush. It is also a smoke screen for ACTUAL intelligence that is being exploited through Capital’s imperialist tendencies. Those little coolers that use AI to drive a subway sandwich to your apartment? It’s “AI” is probably named José and José gets paid $0.10 an hour to drive that little cooler to your house. LIFT or Uber (I forget which) uses “AI” to identify the driver based on a photograph to ensure people are not “sharing” the account (and thus able to be on the road for longer than a single person could). Again, that “AI” is probably named Isabella, and she was paid $0.05 from a microwork platform, and did the “computations” to decide if today you looked like that photo of took when you signed up for LIFT/Uber.

Like all things under capitalism, these automation tools are used in ways that harm workers. This does not make the underlying algorithms and their many applications inherently “unethical”. It’s the actions of the capitalists, that are ultimately unethical.

Freelance artists hold the contradictory position of being semi-autonomous wage-earners. I find this diagram helpful for understanding why they tend to hold certain positions. Also explains why they ally with big companies using IP law against LLM companies. Because they don’t want to become proletarianized.

So as a force of proletarianization, wouldn’t the technology be historically progressive in a Marxist sense? I still hate it though.

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1. Probably not, I’m not gonna complain if people use ChatGPT. But maybe someone has more knowledge than I do. I’d try not to pay for AI, if possible. If you’re a company and you’re profiting off of AI, then you’re stealing the work that was used to try AI.
2. Do you mean as an engineer? Sometimes giving up work is hard.
3. You don’t mean “all” that comes up in the URL?