The embrace of generative AI among certain conservatives came as a surprise to me (a dismaying one, when it means “cheap AI slop”). The White House posting a “Ghiblified” meme of an ICE handcuffing Virginia Basora-Gonzalez was a particularly memorable example.
If the conservative project is about preserving the past, respecting tradition, and moving carefully around Chesterton fences...AI is a odd bedfellow with all that, isn’t it?
Granted, conservativism isn’t a monolith (British conservatism has an obvious tension between its “high tory” wing and the Thatcher neoliberal wing.) But it’s honestly hard to name a force less “trad” than generative AI.
I’d extend this to religion… Does anyone else get the sense that religious/spiritual folk create (and consume) AI generated content well in excess of the general population? I thought this when I was at a church on Sunday, listening to someone deliver a clearly AI generated message (with seemingly dozens of “it’s not x, it’s y” phrases back to back), thinking “doesn’t anyone notice something wrong? Even if you have never used ChatGPT before, this is such a weird way to talk!”).
The last time I checked the “Faith” category of Substack, it was just blatant, shameless AI junk as far as the eye can see. Cheesy kitsch art, with mutant six-fingered Jesuses hugging deformed Pixar lambs. Spiritual bonhomies written in emetic, engagementmaxxed LinkedIn prose. Putting aside your own feelings of religion/AI/whatever...it’s just an alliance of forces that really, really don’t feel natural, or cohesive.
(Art is a particularly stark case: one of the big positive claims religion can make is that it inspires art. Even atheists enjoy cathedrals and mosques and such. You’d expect the faithful to feel protective of this cultural capital, and hostile to anything that cheapens it. And yet the wing of the faithful that exists on Substack can’t get enough of six-fingered AI Jesus.)
(The cultural “sloppening” of Christianity has a long pre-AI history. From Handel and Bach to Christian rock and Hillsong, from CS Lewis to Heaven Is For Real and the Left Behind novels. Blogger Fred Clark had some interesting theories about this—“it’s valuable because of the message!” becoming a defense against shoddy quality, high effort itself seen as suspicious because it’s outside the correct pose of humbleness and “making space for God”, etc. David Chapman’s Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths also comes to mind.)
The embrace of generative AI among certain conservatives came as a surprise to me (a dismaying one, when it means “cheap AI slop”). The White House posting a “Ghiblified” meme of an ICE handcuffing Virginia Basora-Gonzalez was a particularly memorable example.
If the conservative project is about preserving the past, respecting tradition, and moving carefully around Chesterton fences...AI is a odd bedfellow with all that, isn’t it?
Granted, conservativism isn’t a monolith (British conservatism has an obvious tension between its “high tory” wing and the Thatcher neoliberal wing.) But it’s honestly hard to name a force less “trad” than generative AI.
I’d extend this to religion… Does anyone else get the sense that religious/spiritual folk create (and consume) AI generated content well in excess of the general population? I thought this when I was at a church on Sunday, listening to someone deliver a clearly AI generated message (with seemingly dozens of “it’s not x, it’s y” phrases back to back), thinking “doesn’t anyone notice something wrong? Even if you have never used ChatGPT before, this is such a weird way to talk!”).
The last time I checked the “Faith” category of Substack, it was just blatant, shameless AI junk as far as the eye can see. Cheesy kitsch art, with mutant six-fingered Jesuses hugging deformed Pixar lambs. Spiritual bonhomies written in emetic, engagementmaxxed LinkedIn prose. Putting aside your own feelings of religion/AI/whatever...it’s just an alliance of forces that really, really don’t feel natural, or cohesive.
(Art is a particularly stark case: one of the big positive claims religion can make is that it inspires art. Even atheists enjoy cathedrals and mosques and such. You’d expect the faithful to feel protective of this cultural capital, and hostile to anything that cheapens it. And yet the wing of the faithful that exists on Substack can’t get enough of six-fingered AI Jesus.)
(The cultural “sloppening” of Christianity has a long pre-AI history. From Handel and Bach to Christian rock and Hillsong, from CS Lewis to Heaven Is For Real and the Left Behind novels. Blogger Fred Clark had some interesting theories about this—“it’s valuable because of the message!” becoming a defense against shoddy quality, high effort itself seen as suspicious because it’s outside the correct pose of humbleness and “making space for God”, etc. David Chapman’s Geeks, Mops, and Sociopaths also comes to mind.)
just seems part of the current social media clown show. left-coded artists/creatives loathe gen AI. provoking them is the point of using it.