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Weeb Revolution Book Club has finished chapter 10 of Atrocity Fabrication And It’s Consequences. We didn’t read the whole book—we only read some selected chapters (1, 2, 3, 7, 8, and 10), but we may come back to it at a later date to finish off some other chapters. Two new members joined the group so we’re going back to Marxist fundamentals next session with Cornforth’s intro to dialectical materialism.

This blog post is for the book club but feel free to read it too if you want. *shrug*

Since this is the final chapter of Atrocity Fab. the author, Abrams, had to wrap up everything. This is jumping ahead but here is a paragraph on pages 502-503 that capture the essence of the entire book:

As China emerged as the world’s largest economy, and one which could annually publish more scientific papers, spend more on new armaments and apply for more patents than the U.S., it would have been highly unusual and sharply contrary to historical trends for Western sources not to fabricate atrocities to vilify it. Allegations of Xinjiang atrocities, concentration camps, and genocide, emerged at a time of rising Sino-U.S. tensions in the mid-late 2010s and a growing consensus in the Western world on the need for a hard line against Beijing.

Xinjiang’s Uyghur population were the latest Kuwaiti incubator babies, the latest American civilians killed in Cuban terrorist attacks, the latest Filipino civilians brutalised by the Huks or Syrian victims of their government’s chemical weapons. They were Park Yeonmi forced to walk across three mountains and bury her father, Iraqi dissidents fed live into human shredders, students run over by tanks in Tiananmen Square, or Libyan women raped by Gaddafi’s black African mercenaries. What all these alleged victims had in common was that the crimes against them were never actually committed but were very widely publicised to build narratives which furthered Western foreign policy objectives. The Xinjiang narrative was the culmination of decades of Western atrocity fabrication intended to justify hostile measures against adversaries, and targeted a country which represented an unprecedentedly strong challenge to Western hegemony.

Before I begin I would also like to recommend Telling Tall Tales: “Uyghur Genocide” as a Political Stratagem by Barry Sautman which is even more in depth than Abrams’ chapter on Xinjiang since it devotes the topic to a full book. I do recommend reading Abrams’ treatment on the topic first though since it’s a quicker read.

Now. Here’s’s the recap for chapter 10: Xinjiang and the Sino-U.S Conflict

The major sections are:

Xinjiang Security Challenges and Foreign Involvement

• This chapter begins not with the allegations themselves, but with historical background about Western utilization of jihadist groups (something talked about in many chapters of this book in fact! So if one is reading this book normally you’re already familialr with past examples) to attack countries targeted for destabilization, and the geopolitical situation around China.

The American strategic imperative of preventing Eurasian economic integration, most famously articulated by one of Washington’s leading geopolitical strategists Zbigniew Brzezinski, provided a strong motivation for Washington to target BRI. The U.S. Senate’s Strategic Competition Act of 2021, which allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to creating media content negatively covering BRI-associated programs, was one of many consequences, and leveraged various state propaganda tools such as Radio Free Asia which simultaneously received significant funding increases. Xinjiang’s position meant American and allied efforts to stifle BRI also came to target the province’s economy and its stability from the late 2010s, with these efforts escalating the following decade.

Footnote 1:

This is important! To falsify events and history history in Xinjiang is a position that aligns you with imperialism. All it does is make life worse for Uyghurs by legitimizing economic sanctions against them. Sanctions are collective punishment. They kill.

Note ETIM/TIP. They are important.

Like Tibet before it in the 1950s and 60s (see Chapter 3), U.S. efforts to stir unrest in Xinjiang leveraged the relatively low living standards of the province’s Muslim and Turkic Uyghur ethnic minority. Having migrated to China from Central Asia in previous centuries, their nomadic lifestyle fuelled low literacy and education rates and at times caused difficulties integrating into modern society. Many Uyghurs were thus susceptible to Islamic extremism with significant numbers joining UN-recognised terrorist organisations such as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), which later rebranded itself as the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), as well as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State to fight in multiple jihadist wars overseas. The possibility of expanded terrorist attacks by radicalised Uyghurs, and of the minority’s economic status fuelling recruitment to radical groups, had the potential to turn Xinjiang into another Tibet or a Chechnya should radical elements be strengthened sufficiently. (Pgs. 444-445)

• As Abrams noted:

As Western cooperation with Islamist groups expanded, and as Washington’s attentions came to focus more on Beijing in the 2010s, the possibility of similar operations targeting Xinjiang only grew. In 2018 former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence B. Wilkerson, noted to this effect that a primary reason for the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan was its proximity to powerful Uyghur Islamist militants in Xinjiang:

If the CIA has to mount an operation using those Uyghurs, as [Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan has done in Turkey against [Syrian President Bashar Al] Assad, there are 20,000 of them in Idlib in Syria right now for example . . . those Uyghurs that Erdogan invited in. Well, the CIA would want to destabilise China and that would be the best way to do it. To foment unrest and to join with those Uyghurs in pushing the Han Chinese and Beijing from internal places rather than external. (Pgs. 447-448)

Sound unbelievable someone would say this aloud? Well here’s the recording of Wilkerson saying this shit. Link to full remarks. And here’s my shortened clip:

• Turkey is prominent throughout this whole chapter for supporting these types of groups:

(Sidenote: apparently there’s this one guy on Tumblr who’s been taking every opportunity to be racist as hell about Turkey. If anyone tries to use this blog post to do that they’re getting blocked. Be fucking serious)

(Pgs. 449-451)

• China’s Security Challenge

In China itself Uyghur Islamist militants carried out multiple major attacks primarily targeting infrastructure and civilians, including in many cases killings of the Muslim Uyghur civilians who were unsupportive of the jihadist cause. One of the earliest was the bombing of two busses and attempted bombing of a cinema and a residential building by ETIM in the provincial capital of Urumqi in 1992 causing 26 casualties […] Three further terror attacks on August 4, 10, and 12, 2008, targeted Kashgar, Kuqa and Yamanya respectively, all in Xinjiang […] More than a dozen further attacks by radicalised Uyghur Islamists over the following decade took a heavy toll on China’s civilian population, targeting civilians indiscriminately and in many cases killing dozens at a time. A 2016 study commissioned by the U.S. government highlighted that from 2012 to 2014 attacks in China “apparently became more frequent, more geographically dispersed, and more indiscriminately targeted.” Targets ranged from off-duty coal miners – of whom at least 50 were killed in September 2015 – to commuters at Kunming railway station where knife-wielding militants slaughtered 31 and injured another 140 in March 2014. The Kunming attack was referred to by some analysts as ‘China’s 9/11,’ but was far from outstanding in its severity among the many attacks perpetrated. The most well-known attack was perpetrated on October 28, 2013, when an ETIM suicide attack on Tiananmen Square caused 40 civilian casualties. Security at Tiananmen, which symbolised the heart of the People’s Republic of China, had to be stepped up considerably afterwards. (Pgs. 453-455)

These next two screenshots summarize probably the biggest takeaway from the chapters. The vocational education training centers (VETCs) were not concentration camps. They were an effort to de-radicalize people from committing acts of terrorism against others. As the underlined part emphasizes they were similar programs in other countries at the exact same time that did not receive the same level of media attention.

(Pgs. 455-456)

Western Claims of Concentration Camps and Genocide in Xinjiang

Here is a quote from Sautman’s previously mentioned book that talks about sources in regards to Western allegations of mistreatment by China. It gets into many of the same points made by Abrams in this chapter

Those who claim crimes against humanity in Xinjiang also base their allegations almost solely two categories of sources 1) testimonials of Uyghur émigrés who were likely mobilized by separatist groups outside China and who make highly implausible claims – for example of the universality of forced sterilization of Uyghur women; and 2) skewed collections of documents assembled by monomaniacal anti-China figures that exclude any analysis that counters the Uyghur émigré narrative. There is no hint that the testimonials were at all subjected to cross-examination or that the assembled documents were subjected to critical scrutiny. These sources would be disregarded as inadmissible in any case alleging serious human rights violations. (Pg. 102)

• Adrien Zenz is often mentioned because he is a major source of the claims. He is not the sole source of every false claim, but he is a major source of the 2019 allegation that 1.5 million Uyghurs were imprisoned in concentration camps, and then 2021 allegations that genocide was being committed. Zenz, a fellow at the U.S.-government-funded Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VCMF), is a religious right-wing fanatic, can’t read Chinese, and is a deeply problematic source for anything.

Although hailed by multiple Western media outlets as a “world leading expert” on Xinjiang and “the go to source” on the issue, as the BBC referred to him [What a joke 😂], Zenz’s credibility was highly questionable. He had taught exclusively in evangelical theological institutions and never at mainstream universities, and his reports on Xinjiang, although very widely cited by Western media outlets and NGOs, were not published in peer-reviewed journals overseen by academic institutions. Other significant red flags raised by Zenz’s work indicated that it was something other than honest and transparent scholarship. One was that while academic papers required funding sources to be listed, those details were missing from his publications. Another was that while the research relied heavily on Chinese language sources, and as Zenz could not read Chinese, there was likely a team of unidentified people involved in writing his papers despite his being listed as the sole author (Pgs. 458-459)

• Various Uyghur émigré that received funding from the National Endowment For Democracy (NED)—a U.S. government funded organization designed to spread propaganda around U.S. geopolitical enemies or further U.S. interests—include The World Uyghur Congress, the Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation, the Uyghur American Association, and The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). Radio Free Asia (RFA) is prominent in this chapter too.

• Here is information about that famous picture of Chinese prisoners wearing those blue jumpsuits while in a prison. The photo and the prison also had nothing to do with the VETCs!!!

A second image which came to characterise the Western narrative on Xinjiang was a photograph of men in prison uniforms sitting in rows. Taken from the Xinjiang Judicial Administration’s WeChat social media page, the WeChat logo was notably cut off in all major Western uses of the image which required cropping out the hands of the front row of prisoners. The BBC was the first to do this, while others then used the cropped image provided by the BBC. The photograph – dubbed by some the “world’s most misused photo” – became the West’s poster image for the alleged Chinese atrocities. It was accordingly used the cover for hundreds of articles on “concentration camps” and “genocide,” and even as the cover image for the Wikipedia page on “Uyghur genocide.” Looking to the original WeChat post, other photos of the same event from different angles showed that the number of prisoners was far smaller than the first angle chosen by the BBC made it appear, and that they were attending a lecture on prisoner reform. This could be seen from the slogans on the front stage as well as the original captions. The images had been taken in a regular prison in the spring of 2017 and had nothing to do with the education centres. Much like the ‘tank man’ footage outside Tiananmen square (see Chapter 3), Western sources again picked a particular image and misrepresented it to support a fabricated narrative. (Pgs. 463-464)

• The rest of the chapter focuses on debunking the claims of forced sterilization. For the sake of brevity I’ll quote just this part:

Although Western sources widely claimed China was sterilising Uyghurs and encouraging migration by the Han majority ethnic group to colonise Xinjiang, official figures showed that the Uyghur population grew by 25.04 percent from 2010 to 2018 alone. This represented an increase of 2.55 million, up from 10.17 million to 12.72 million, which was a much higher growth rate than average for Xinjiang’s population at 13.99 percent, as well as being higher than that of all ethnic minority groups. The Han population’s growth, by contrast, was just two percent. Data in Adrian Zenz’s own reports showed that the Uyghur population almost doubled from 1985 to 2018 while the Han majority population fell substantially from 2015 to 2018. [Sautman notes in his book that migrants are counted in population censuses in China. So Han migrants, who will leave Xinjiang at a later point, actually end up inflating their numbers. It’s quite an interesting statistical phenomena actually.]

The Uyghurs, as with all 55 minority groups, had been exempted from China’s one child policy, with families of half a dozen or more being far from unheard of as a result. Although fertility rates were far above average among China’s Muslim minorities, by the 2010s they were falling for all ethnic groups as living standards improved and the economy modernised. This represented part of a globally observable trend towards families having fewer children as countries became more affluent. As medical statistician at St. Luke’s International University in Japan, Professor Stuart Gilmour, was one of many to observe, Western allegations of genocide and mass sterilisation relied on “present[ing] the benefits of birth control strategies as genocide,” highlighting that fertility rates were falling across much of the world. “Is every country in Asia conducting genocide on its own people?,” he posited, pointing to similar and in many cases more drastic falls in birth rates across the continent to show how this widely occurring phenomenon was being totally misrepresented to further the narrative of abuses in Xinjiang. (Pg. 466)

The Western Campaign Escalates

• I’ll let these two quotes speak for themselves:

Despite being a major Al Qaeda affiliate, and having committed multiple widely recognised atrocities against civilians, the East Turkistan Islamic Party’s designation as a terrorist organisation was rescinded by U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in November 2020. (Pg. 467)

And

The Joe Biden administration, inaugurated on January 20 just one day after Pompeo’s genocide allegation, quickly reaffirmed the statement. The State Department’s Office of the Legal Advisor, however, concluded the following month that there was insufficient evidence to prove genocide. Nevertheless, on February 23 and 26 the Canadian and Dutch parliaments respectively followed Washington’s lead and formally accused Beijing of committing genocide against the Uyghur minority.

Genocide Joe and these Western governments have a lot of fucking nerve to allege this shit when they’ve been the ones enabling Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

• This section talks about a variety of things and I feel it would be redundant to repeat everything here. However I should note the debunking of various satellite images spread by anti-China groups who alleged the images to be concentration camps in China.

For example, a “4th level detention centre with a well and a watchtower” turned out to be a gerocomium. A “1st level re-education camp” turned out to be a logistics park, and two “1st level detention centres” turned out to be an elementary and middle school. From the air, however, one could claim they were just about anything. Images of elderly Xinjiang residents receiving medical care were similarly cited by Adrian Zenz as evidence of forced birth control in Xinjiang – although there was nothing in the photo to indicate that nor did any of the couples pictured appear to be of childbearing age. (Pg. 472)

• Various travel bloggers, expat YouTubers, and business people are cited to debunk Western claims of genocide and mistreatment in Xinjiang. In a hilarious instance of showing their asses Western media reacts hilariously:

Western media outlets consistently harshly criticised expatriates living in China, many of whom visited Xinjiang, who denounced Western claims of genocide. The BBC, for one, equated such questioning of the Western narrative with “spreading Communist Party disinformation” and strongly implied the need for policing to restrict such expats’ reach on YouTube and other social media platforms. Even some dedicated critics of the Chinese government and its policies conceded that Western reporting and the work of hardline activists did not reflect reality on the ground. (Pgs. 474-475)

• And again it’s important to put the Xinjiang narrative in a pattern:

This was hardly unique to commentary concerning Xinjiang, with the political culture in the West leading to widespread self-censorship particularly over claims of atrocities or national security threats. Taking the media response to fabricated claims surrounding the Iraq War as an example, Columnist Norman Solomon observed: “In contrast to state censorship, which is usually easy to recognise, self-censorship by journalists is rarely out in the open. In the highly competitive media environment, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist or social scientist to know that dissent does not boost careers. . . . The rewards of going along to get along are clear. So are the hazards of failure to toe the line.” Surveys repeatedly highlighted that despite rising doubts regarding the veracity of claims against Iraq, no leading U.S. outlets expressed significant disagreement and differed only on the means or urgency for disarming or overthrowing the Iraqi government. The penalty for doing more could be severe. This closely mirrored the case for the Xinjiang narrative. (Pg. 477)

A Turning Point in Western Isolation from the International Community

• Here we see a surprising thing with many non-Western governments pushing back against the Western claims… likely because many of them actually visited China and saw the bullshit aspect of the narrative. :v

One of the key objectives of Western efforts to fabricate the narrative of a Chinese genocide was to turn global opinion against Beijing and unite the international community behind the West in its confrontation with China. Because similar efforts to use atrocity fabrication had been internationally successful in the past against targets ranging from Yugoslavia and (1980s) Afghanistan to North Korea and Libya, the failure of the new campaign against China to gain traction outside the Western world was widely met with surprise. Calls from Western governments, activists and media outlets for the world and Muslim countries in particular to fall in behind the West in criticising and taking a hard line against China were consistently met only with silence, leaving the West alone in making its tenuous claims of Chinese abuses. (Pgs. 479)

And here we have the funniest page in the entire book. Concentrated western coping: (Pg. 481)

More (Pg. 483)

Big two pages (Pgs. 487-488)

• Skipping ahead in this section one can see further sanctions in Xinjiang because of forced labor alleviations—you might have seen one stupid tweet a few months ago talking about Labubus being made with “slave cotton”. But these sanctions just cause Uyghurs suffering. The West is no ally of them. The irony isn’t even funny:

As a result of U.S. moves to impose arbitrary bans based on unproven allegations of forced labour, several international firms in Xinjiang became reluctant to hire Uyghur staff due to concerns that they could be blacklisted. The metanarrative built up in the West led the Western mind to jump to conclusions that any Uyghur in a job would likely be a slave labourer – why else would he or she not be in a concentration camp? Indeed, Western purchasers at times went as far as to ask firms in China whether or not they had Uyghur staff, expressing a preference for a negative response in order to avoid possible negative reactions from overseas. In this way the West’s humanitarian-premised economic warfare campaign fuelled actual discrimination against Uyghurs by the private sector, and led many Uyghur workers to move out of Xinjiang to find employment in other provinces where there was less Western scrutiny.

xxiii As Canadian analyst Daniel Dumbrill observed to this effect: “As for the Uyghurs, the specific measures being taken such as sanctioning products made in Xinjiang by saying it’s made with slave labour without any actual evidence – well ironically it will take away the livelihoods of those Uyghurs. It’s created an interesting situation where I now see foreign China watchers complaining that Uyghurs need to travel out of province in order to find work – which is a kind of cultural genocide they say without any sense of irony that the West is compounding this problem.” (Pg. 499)

• The final note in the book. One can only hope for a world where the West’s media army is weaker and less credible. The New York Times, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera are some of the world’s most effective killers.

(archive link)

very interesting read, lots of worthwhile details, but I really enjoy the sardonic anarchist the journalist spoke with:

adding on to this, a harrowing read on the ugliest features of conscription in ukraine.

I do not believe in 50 years. I don’t. Maybe I’m in denial but I still kind of don’t believe that I’m actually going to serve out this whole sentence and I think there’s a little reason for optimism in that regard. There is a big movement of support for a political pardon for us from the next Democratic president of the United States. My mother told me that my father said that the next time a Democratic president is in office, he’s going to write him a letter to ask for a pardon for me. And that was the first positive interaction that I’ve had with my dad in five years. And when I heard that, I just burst into tears and, like, just became hysterical for five minutes because it was just the perfection of the absurdity of the time to me. My arch-conservative father, who I can’t really stand to be in the same room as right now because of his transphobia, that he would do this thing, right, like appeal to a Democratic president on my behalf. And it really shows this bipartisan sentiment that this is obviously unjust, this is obviously political. You know, if this arch-conservative and I can find common ground over the belief that this is a political persecution, I think that there’s a very strong chance for some future good thing to come our way out of that.

...

[interviewer]: Is there anything else I didn’t ask you that you want to get out, that you wanna say in this context? Obviously, people will see this and I know you have limited connection to the outside world.

AH: I would say the same thing that I’ve said before, which is: Be brave. We’ve been accused of being terrorists, but terror is the power that this administration wants to ply in order to keep people quiet, in order to keep people content. Fear of incarceration, fear of homelessness, you know, it’s this fear, this fear that we’re going to lose our privileges, that we are going to use our comfort, that keeps people docile, keeps people from speaking the truth. Don’t be afraid.

https://www.unclosetedmedia.com/p/autumn-hill-speaks-from-jail-after

as for the tweet that was screenshotted: her fellow protestors are in prison alongside her, that's why they're not protesting to demand her release. Here's a website with more information about the whole case. We're still trying to bring them all home, regardless of gender

There has been a lot of organising and protesting and fundraising and solidarity around the prairieland defendants, and actually autumn hill has been one of the main people in the spotlights for that, out of all the arrestees.

(in response to the events shown in this ask)

my position on "the cara situation" is tied to my position on cara and these "anti-ai" platforms in general.

general contradictions

i think it's fine to ban AI content for honest reasons like "we think it's icky", "we want to show solidarity with working artists", or "people don't like it and we're doing this by popular demand". like it's your Webbed Site, do what you want. but i take issue with people and projects that claim to be concerned with "quality", "copyright", "freedom", "art", "exploitation" and such, when these concerns only begin and end with AI, and aren't part of a broader, more coherent political position.

if you poke enough, you'll usually discover that these people have no idea how much AI they use in everyday life (e.g. Google Translate, which has been powered by AI for a decade now), who don't understand it, and who have extremely incoherent takes on the topics listed above.

for example, push enough and they'll often admit that translation, coding, etc. are Lesser forms of work so they can use AI. or they'll demand that this work be done by hand (which is frankly absurd and disrespectful to the workers and hobbyists involved in those fields).

IMO the core of the mindset is always "copyright infringement is harm -> it's ok for the little guy (me) to harm big corporations, and bad for big corporations to harm the little guy (me) -> ai is always big corporations harming the little guy (me) -> ai bad" which relies on a ton of completely incorrect but widespread assumptions about who wields copyright law, who buys and sells labor, who owns and buys and sells intellectual property, etc.

that's the problem. they don't have coherent strategies against capitalism, they act to protect their small-business-owner ideology/interests. the idea that "it's always ok to punch up and bad to punch down" is a good personal moral compass but not a substitute for actual principles and actual political positions. if you follow it based on vibes you'll just echo what capitalist ideology says is "punching", "up" and "down": you'll reach individualist, reactionary, plain wrong conclusions.

on cara, specifically

cara as a project is built on naivety at best and lies at worst. it touts itself as fighting a battle it cannot possibly win, as we can see for ourselves. being an "anti AI" social media doesn't actually protect your users from the main source of scraping, because that's not "evil CEOs selling your data". it's that your data is online and anyone can grab it and do whatever they want with it, as has always been the case online. wanting to be free of this limitation is a pipe dream, selling this promise to people is a grift.

moreover, cara's focus on Glaze and Nightshade (as a reminde, Glaze is AI-powered!) is also disingenuous because these products offer a paper-thin protection at best, and are marketed by teams that turn a blind eye to researchers' criticism.

what happened recently is that cara's defenses crumbled instantly, under the touch of a single mean-spirited amateur who only had to spend like $10 on this "attack". this was a dick move but also kinda "waow (based)" for revealing the truth, you know? cara's defenses were always illusory and its failure was inevitable. i sympathize with Ms. Zhang's situation (this must be stressful) but it was only going to end this way. Zhang and co are now resorting to moral outrage and begging capitalist lawmakers for help, further highlights their approach's futility.

the premise itself is wrong

and the truth is… they aren't even fighting a real problem!

first, because the "attack" really just compiled a list of URLs. that's all it did. that's what most datasets are. public data is still public data, but now it's just put in a file optimized for AI training. big deal.

second, the days of scraping random artists for training data are over. the "attacker" here is making an ideological point, no one actually benefits from cara's scraped art. ai models today are trained on:

licensed data bought legally from huge companies like disney, and/or

synthetic data generated by existing AI models in a way that is transformative enough that it's not illegal and no one cares, and/or

public domain and creative commons art.

third, even if that wasn't the case, and AI models were still dependent on scraped fanart or whatever, there's still no material harm: what you have is a lost sale. it's piracy. it's someone reverse-engineering your invention or software to copy how it works. i am not sympathetic to this line of thought. the "attacker" can do this for capitalist or non-capitalist reasons, but the "defender" here only protests based on capitalist logic.

the fact is that if AI tools "weren't ethical" back in 2022, there are ethical ones now. cara stated they'd change their anti-AI policy if these tools "became ethical", but they haven't, because it's not actually about ethics, it's about ideology. it's a culture war.

a reactionary response

and again, that culture war takes extremely dangerous, reactionary forms. a while back, Ms. Zhang compared "AI" (again, assigning personhood to it, which is a bad idea) to demons from the anime Frieren, a species of creatures that look, talk and act like people but aren't actually people: they aren't conscious, they don't think, they are essentially a natural phenomenon that exists to infiltrate, betray and destroy humanity. needless to say, the fans of Sword Hero Cleanses The Undesirables are excited to be racist to robots.

we see a more insidious reaction with the focus on permission culture, consent and straight-up comparisons to misogyny and rape. Zhang uses words like "violated", "consent", "we just want to exist", "destroyed", "a store broken into", "illegal", "demolished houses", a "digital age of violence and anti-consent". her followers outright crank it up to "taking away safe spaces and control over our own art", "ai bros and rape culture", "misogyny", implied pedophilia and rape accusations, so on.

in there you'll still notice they take a potshot at ai "artists" (air quotes), because it's very important to them that stuff can't be art if it's made by bad people, or with problematic technology or production processes, or if it has problematic themes. the "fascists can't make good art" position is very helpful if you don't want to think critically about anything ever.

all of this is ultimately in the service of petit bourgeois (i.e. self-employed, small business) workers, as opposed to proletarians. they are incentivized to act like capitalists and lobby for the legal protections afforded to big capitalists, to demand these laws expand in reach and power, for their personal benefit. this would be, of course, really bad!

working-class struggles and public opinion

there are people being actually exploited in the AI and art ecosystems. these are data workers in the global south, wage workers forced by contracts to give up the copyrights to their art to their employers. meanwhile, self-employed artists, who get to keep the copyright, are only 1/3rd of working artists. but the "anti-AI pro-artist" conversation has never been about these proletarian data/art workers.

as we can see with Google Translate and tons of other stuff, AI is a part of technology today and it's used in many fields because it has real applications, including in art. especially in socialist countries like China that use AI wisely and keep their capitalists on a tight leash! hell, non-western countries are pretty excited about AI: it levels the playing field, since previously rich countries could use poor countries as cheap workers, but now rich and poor countries can use AI as a cheap worker.

in 10 years, the western kids who grew up with AI being a normal, mainstream thing will be shaping the political landscape. i bet they'll look at anti-AI fearmongering the same way we (Gen Z/millennials) look at "phone bad!!" moral panics, and by then AI art processes will become a part of digital art workflows under different names ("smart upscale", "magic fill"…) until people forget they were ever mad about it.

the path forward

projects like cara are unable to resist or offer solutions to this social, technological and economic change because it is caused by capitalism, by privately owned means of production, and they can't address this root cause. because the only way to truly regulate AI and make it stop being a threat to livelihoods and culture is to follow in China's footsteps.

that is, we must socialize the means of production! our relationship to automation technologies like AI must change so that they are owned by a worker-controlled state, not private actors. this has allowed China to beat the U.S. AI ecosystem recently, forcing Nvidia to join 50 other tech companies in a trenchcoat as a response, in an attempt to catch up to what the Chinese state can do. socialized A also allows the birthplace of China's AI model DeepSeek to have pro-worker anti-AI legal rulings!

Made of

Ethical romantasy