[threateningly]

If you want to know more about the AI side of style transfer and how it aligns with capitalist extraction in the creative industry, take a look at our #chi2025 paper:

arxiv.org/abs/2409.17410

If this week has taught us anything, is that styles are never "just" styles.

They are at the core of our cultural, political and economic lives and how we think about, and do things with them has a tremendous impact on our lives.

(A real Miyazaki sketch to cleanse your feed.)

But styles are not natural resources, they are the product of human labor.

As illustrator Roman Muradov put it "The generated result may resemble something real, but it bypasses the labor, and says nothing, adds nothing. The process is the thing"

substack.com/@bluebed/not...

But styles are also not surfaces to apply anywhere indiscriminately

What genAI models generate is not style, it's a superficial veil designed to benefit capitalist extraction of value from artists' labor

As styles become detached from artists, they become construed as natural resources up for grab

the tech stack musk is using is incidental. computer scientists who happen to be interested in LLMs will make careers out of the next 4 years chasing the idiosyncrasies of the implementations of these systems, condescendingly dismissing the study of the political movement animating all of this shit

i'm not going to belabor the point, except to say that people doing challenging work - as in, work that challenges the hegemonic epistemology that tech companies salivate over - don't endear themselves to that tech $$$ (not independently, not in academia, not anywhere), and are especially struggling

as it turns out my control deck's wincon is, in order:
- 9 boardwipes into concede
- raw cast riptide gearhulk
- timescam