Unless you are training your models at home on your own private server, the current generation of ML models are dependent on the capitalist corporate model. They are trained on large datasets collected by corporate surveillance using server farms owned and operated by corporations, by developers paid by those corporations.

The capitalism and the "AI" are inextricably linked. If you use any of their apps you are patronizing them.

It normalizes the use of genAI for even more things.

Today it's just shitposts, where quality isn't important.

Tomorrow it'll be one off projects that their creator really wanted to be out, so quality won't be important.

After tomorrow, it'll be small group efforts becoming "solo endeavours" with lower quality artwork.

After that, it'll be corporations within the creative fields that really want to lay off their workforce, even if it means lower quality work, because they can make up with the lower production costs and higher quantity.

And one day, we will wake up to a reality, where everything is AI generated slop, and we won't be the "idea guys", who write the prompts for them.

If you ask: not all other technologies were all good either. Cars made us dependent on them, forever restructuring our cities, atomizing our communities. Hell, some of the tools that made creative endeavors, such as home recording and easy to use game engines caused "the bedroom djent kid" and "fetishization of solo indie devs" problems respectively.

Uh huh, and how many graphic artists lost their jobs because of this model (and others like it) being sold to companies as a way to produce marketing material without paying an artist?

And how many unnecessary pounds of carbon were pumped into the atmosphere because of this meme?

I'm actually not sure how to interpret this image in this context... are you implying that the argument over AI is part of the culture war distraction? or are you agreeing with me that AI is a tool of "they"?

My standards would have accepted a doodle made in Paint. This is lower effort than that, for way more computational power wasted (which, in turn, means more energy and heat wasted).