It's not doctrinaire to recognize the differences between the proletariat and petit bourgeoisie. By refusing to make this distinction, you are making a very common mistake wherein you are presenting the interests of the petit bourgeoisie as if they are proletarian interests. Labor is not a commodity. Labor cannot be bought or sold. You can sell the products of your own labor, and you can sell your own labor-power, but you cannot sell labor. The class that makes a living selling the products of their own labor is the petit bourgeoisie. The class that makes a living selling their own labor-power is the proletariat.
The class distinction between proletariat and petit bourgeoisie is not one about individual material outcomes or political leanings. There are landlords who are barely scraping by. There are wealthy business owners who are communists. But that doesn't change their class position. When Marxists say that the petit bourgeoisie is not a revolutionary class, it is not an indictment of its members or a declaration that the petit bourgeoisie as individuals can never be committed revolutionaries. It is merely the observation of the position of the petit bourgeoisie as a class in decline relative to the ascending proletariat within capitalism. The petit bourgeoisie continue to split into either proletarians or bourgeoisie, despite membership within the petit bourgeoisie continuing to be an attractive prospect for bourgeois-aspirant proletarians.
There is nothing morally wrong with running a small business to survive. If someone is making their living making keychains and selling them on Etsy, that doesn't make them a bad person. But they're not a proletarian. Someone who buys raw materials, uses their labor to turn them into something else, and then sells the resulting products is straightforwardly a petit bourgeois artisan, regardless of how poor they are or how much of a communist they are. They are not selling their labor-power, they are selling the products of their labor in competition with other products on the market. A proletarian, on the other hand, does not make a living selling any products. They make their living selling their labor-power to capitalist employers. It is their employer who owns and sells the products of their labor.
This doesn't become an outdated paradigm in the context of modern visual art. A freelance illustrator who works on contract for various projects is a proletarian. They don't own or sell the products of their labor and they don't expect to. They come into a project, work as part of a team, get their paycheck, and then someone else owns the final work as IP and profits from it. In contrast, an independent visual artist who sells art directly to consumers is petit bourgeois. They are selling the products of their labor on the market in competition with other producers of art.
As a result, the petit bourgeois visual artist has a fundamentally different relationship to IP than a proletarian visual artist does. The petit bourgeois artist by default holds the copyright to the art they create. They can sell the rights, they can sell copies, but most importantly they have the legal right to prevent other people from making unauthorized copies of any works they hold the rights to. This legal monopoly exists to bolster the profitability of IP ownership.
Now we come to the crux of your argument. Does AI image generation "alienate" indie artists from the products of their labor "at scale"? It's unclear what exactly you mean here.
A person could use an AI image generator to plagiarize particular works, but the model itself won't do that unprompted. If I tell the AI to make the Mona Lisa, that painting is famous enough for most models to overfit it and reproduce it somewhat accurately, but if I tell it to make an oil painting of a smiling woman with brown hair, it's going to give me novel images unrelated to the Mona Lisa or to any other such painting in existence. The concept of AI image generation as an "automated plagiarism machine" is not accurate. The influence of any particular image in the training data on the final model's weights are far too minuscule for any generic output to be realistically considered plagiarism.
On the other hand, the use of AI as a replacement for labor is a much more realistic concern. Employers and consumers alike are enamored with the idea of a machine that can create art at the fraction of the cost of human artists. So doesn't this mean that proletarian and petit bourgeois artists should be united in this front against the threat of AI? Not exactly.
Proletarian artists are at risk of getting hired less and earning less money if their employers decide to use AI image generation to replace some or all of their art needs. Their interests lie in preventing layoffs and wage cuts that could result from the unrestricted use of AI in the workplace. Petit bourgeois artists, on the other hand, are at risk of consumers choosing AI art over their own art. Their interests lie in preventing competition from AI in the consumer market and preserving their particular market niche.
So while both groups seem to face the same threat on the surface, the different ways in which they are threatened lead to different approaches to combating that threat. While proletarian artists have the opportunity to organize and negotiate particular contracts with their employers, petit bourgeois artists don't have that opportunity. That's why you see petit bourgeois and bourgeois artists both fighting to limit access to and development of open source and consumer-level AI image generation software via accusations of gross copyright violation and proposals to expand the scope of copyright.
Since proletarian artists don't own any IP and don't benefit from copyright, they don't have any dog in these particular fights. Even if Disney wins against Midjourney in court, it's not like Disney's employees will see any benefits. Disney could still train their own AI model on the vast amounts of IP that Disney has the rights to and their employees would still be at risk of being laid off and replaced by AI. Petit bourgeois indie artists on the other hand would benefit from consumers losing access to a popular image generation tool and thus there being less competition for art on the market.
This is why class distinctions are important in these discussions. They help us to determine what exactly motivates particular perspectives on AI and IP law and what we should advocate for if we are to advocate for the interests of the proletariat. Attacking the existence of AI as a technology, accusing it of being a plagiarism machine or an art thief or a violator of copyright, and advocating for expanded copyright protections are all petit bourgeois positions that do not align with the material interests of the proletariat.
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