the work of the artist in the age of mechanical reproduction
five non-luddite policies to support artists
Around my corner of the web, people have been discussing technological unemployment for artists, prompted by Jason Allen’s Midjourney scene winning a fine arts contest.
Some artists worry that the advent of AI-enabled art will put them out of business, demanding that these tools be banned, and other people make fun of them, citing some pretty inarguable points:
prompting Midjourney and other tools involves quite a lot of time and skill, just like other “cheating” techniques that made people mad in the past, like photography or camera obscura
AI-enabled art - like any other new medium -opens up new artistic possibilities, and we should be excited by these, rather than close it off
banning techniques like these is infeasible
this is special pleading - you could ban any set of efficient techniques throughout the economy and it would help the employment of someone; why not demand that traditional fine artists use only artisanally made brushes?
Still, I think it’s a bit unfair to mock someone’s admittedly dumb attempt to survive - or even metaphysically dubious cope (“that isn’t art!”) in the face of doom - without offering a better alternative. Don’t say “then perish” with too much relish; the market is coming for you, too.
What do we actually want? Well, what I actually want is an economy where people can spend a substantial amount of their time on artistic projects, even if the marginal cost of including any art you might want on a consumer product falls to zero. I want this because
“supply-driven” art created because the artist wanted to create the thing is always going to be more interesting, surprising, and frankly neat than an artist trying to guess, even accurately, at what I’m willing to pay for
art and the ability to pursue it are intrinsic goods; as with other claims about intrinsic goods I find this difficult to give reasons for, but hard to avoid unless you want to convert the universe to hedonium or something
So here are a few possibilities for how to protect the place of the artist. My only limit on feasibility be that they be more feasible than banning AI art - which leaves a lot of room. Incidentally, all of these should equally protect the space of “centaur” artists deploying their creativity and skill with AI as a medium. (Allen, above, estimates about 80 hours of work for a $300 prize - in other words, already an activity that makes no sense as a form of market activity, even as it advances human values.)
Universal basic income
You already know the arguments around this.
universal sabbaticals
Tenured professors traditionally get once every seven years off to work on longer-term projects. You know who else should? Everybody! If you’re a waitress who has a kazoo band, should get a year off for kazoo time every so often.
If a substantial number of people “cheat the system” by using this for childcare or smoking weed, good for them.
pre-tirement
We let old people not work, why not have some time during our most creative years instead? This could have some additional knock-on benefits, like allowing people who find special value (internal or external) in various projects pursue it later. Explore, then exploit!
Some of you might be saying: “wait, isn’t this just college? Especially when we just let kids fuck around with some weird ideas, dye their hair, and take basket-weaving classes?” Indeed, I think it’s pretty close in a lot of ways, and bizarrely makes this one of the most feasible goals, since “expand college access and attendance” has normie acceptance and interest groups behind it. The problems relate, I think, to the confused justifications with which this is pursued; college is marketed as an engine of economic growth or social mobility, which it can be for individuals but probably less so the more you aggregate; and the trendy view is that kids spend too much time being useless at college, with things like student debt relief only encouraging irresponsible behavior. On the contrary I think we’re just vastly undestimating the illegible social and individual benefits of underwater basket weaving, and squeezing those for some legible benefits would be a tragedy.
The system is also, of course, poorly designed for producing its illegible benefits - largely a by-product of attempts at legible benefits plus the social reproduction needs of an administrator class. Designing a pre-tirememt system from the ground up is left for a later post, or as an exercise for the reader.
job guarantees
Job guarantees are only slightly less discussed than UBI. Here are three variants that try to aim at giving people the freedom to pursue art:
universal part-time work; in which the state offers 30 (or whatever)-hour workweeks to all. The state’s market power, offering of an alternative, and central example can all help to influence lower formal work hours throughout the economy, which can free up time for art, parenthood, &c.
universal jobs with personal choice; like in the WPA. If you say you’re an artist, the jobs agency finds something artisty for you to do - hence all the murals and eyewitness histories produced by the WPA. By demanding that people did something that seemed sorta useful but not inquiring too much beyond that, the WPA enabled a lot of on-the-job training and cool stuff.
universal hybrid jobs; here you might demand that people do x hours of something legibly/traditionally jobby, and then for non-parents, that they additionally work on some kind of artistic project.
Regardless of the form, you could have the state pay at rates a bit below the market, enough to sustain social reproduction, or at the profit-maximizing rate for the state, whichever is higher. This would improve workers’ bargaining position without crowding out the possibilities of workers being hired into potentially more efficient and valuable work on the market (if customers and the workers themselves really think it provides that.) Of course if we are sanguine about economic planning then the state sector might end up outcompeting the private sector entirely entirely, which is great.
libraries, studios, and makerspaces
Another one already implemented to various degrees by local governments. By making it easier to access various artistic media - potters’ wheels, 3D printers, AI compute, whatever - on a library-card or equivalent basis, you can allow more people to be artists.
This is of course just a more general case of making capital resources widely available, a longstanding communist goal that even in lesser quantities could help position workers better.
but isn’t all this just stuff you want anyway?
One could here accuse me of not offering five solutions but one, or more snarkily two: UBI, or UBI with extra steps. In turn I’m offering these not as a solution to this specific problem but because redistribution is what I want anyway.
Guilty as charged, but I’m also genuine about their utility here: I think enabling more art - by enabling more freedom - is one of the reasons I’ve always embraced the “paleo-left” agenda of growth and redistribution. Freedom, equality, and art enable each other; these are all constrained by requirements to produce immediately legible economic value. The latter is necessary - I’m not among those who think that under no economic or other compulsion we’d spontaneously do everything a society of several billion needs to do to survive - but art definitely is one of those things, and at the margin we could do with much less compulsion. Redistribution, a shorter work week, and other good things conducive to a thriving artistic world - free speech, cosmopolitanism, and the rest - are conducive to all sorts of value - even things that will feed into traditional GDP, like scientific research.