President Donald Trump’s administration’s fondness for AI art, seen controversially in its depiction of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention center and anime-fied targets of ICE, is well-known if not widely appreciated.
This visually arresting technology lurched onto the scene only about three years ago, but it has been glommed on to by upstarts on the Right at the same time it’s been vilified by the art establishment and established artists. Big Hollywood, or rather just Hollywood, has sounded the alarm on AI’s threat to the livelihoods of its constituent elements — even if it’s being forced to grudgingly, gradually go along, as evidenced by recent Netflix adoption of AI in an Argentinian science-fiction series.
“If they’re out of it”, says the Right of what’s been called “AI slop” by its detractors, “we’re into it.”
Just ask Dinesh D’Souza.
White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, Trump’s longtime social media guru going back to his first presidential campaign in 2016, is aggressively utilizing AI to continue taking jabs at critics. The communication team he presides over is positively brimming with snarky AI enthusiasts.
According to recent Trump ally Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot, “The administration embraces AI to promote U.S. tech leadership via executive orders, create viral political content, and mock opponents efficiently.”
Spite and trolling are far from the whole of it, however. Though no hard data exists to make indisputable the claim that the Right loves AI art contra the Left, the attitudes of pop entertainment lovers and lay aesthetes, as seen in pushback to art galleries making moves to legitimize the technology, among other newsmaking items, offers anecdotal evidence that it’s the right wing that is most giddy about this confounding new form of graphic synthesis.
The relationship between ideology or partisanship and artificial intelligence or automation would suggest the opposite of all this. In theory, conservatism and the concomitant aversion to upheavals of all kinds, artificial or not, make intuitive sense. Attitudes, for example, toward self-driving cars, despite what the antics of California rioters might suggest, do skew more liberal-favorable, conservative-unfavorable. And little needs to be said about the politics surrounding reproductive technologies or the field of bioethics.
Of course, in America, what counts for conservatism is often a come-what-may embrace of dynamic change, as author and Milton Friedman biographer Jennifer Burns has pointed out. “The Right says not to worry about what the market does to tradition,” she told Lex Fridman in an interview earlier this year. “In America, the market is our tradition.”
Observations on AI art gleaned from social media such as Reddit suggest that the Left feels decidedly more negative about AI than everyone else, especially positive.
“Being pro-generative AI is not associated with any political position, but being anti-generative-AI on the other hand, seems to be practically, like, 95% aligned with being liberal,” one user claimed. “Are there any anti-AI conservatives?”
Indeed, there are some anti-AI people on the right. American Conservative contributor J. Arthur Bloom told the Washington Examiner that “an old generation of tasteless and vulgar conservative patrons is being switched out for a new, even more tasteless and vulgar set from the tech world.” Ouch.
If progressives are so consumed by fighting what they believe to be fake news, is it any wonder they’re put off by fake imagery and video? It’s all enough to convince themselves they’re holding the line of the “reality-based community” against the surrealism of the nationalist right and its virtually reality-delivering coterie of tech brethren.
University of Utah scholar Hollis Robbins places the AI enthusiasts in the pragmatic, business-oriented, albeit anti-intellectual camp, against the humanist aesthetes who wring their hands about what AI is doing to authenticity across various domains. In her schema, the efficient is synonymous with the imaginatively deficient, if not cognitively.
“Drawing on [Richard] Hofstadter’s framework,” she wrote, “the intellectuals (leaning toward abstractions, critical inquiry, skepticism, contemplation, and a devotion to the ‘life of the mind,’), would be the human-centered critics, AI safety & alignment researchers, skeptics & doubters, and de-growthers.”
This equation of the moody, meandering, and abstract with the Left and the cheerful, productive, and technical with the Right has a long, unfair history. But it’s not entirely off the mark. Nor is it unequivocally better to be intellectual yet perpetually unhappy or cynical.
One online forum poster by the name of RandomRanger claimed that, due to conservatives being essentially barred, if informally, from the world of the arts and very thin on the ground among graphic designers and adjacent professions, their zealous adoption of AI art is an opportunity too good to pass up. For them, AI video and imagery have no livelihood to threaten, though it may represent the beginning of one, as evidenced by X account “FloydAI.”
“The left are the slow-moving established players,” RandomRanger wrote. “The right are the disruptive start-ups, so they’re always going to make more use of new technology.”
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The intrinsic appeal of AI art, to the Right or Left aside, what it surely represents is a kind of narrative-upset power that the Right has been waiting to get its hand on for ages. Discourse around fake news, fake photos, or fake anything isn’t particularly compelling if you believe you’ve been living with omnipresent lies for decades, as it is. There’s perhaps a “but he’s our son-of-a-b****” factor at work.
A fed-up, arguably nihilist streak on the Right disregards popular concerns about AI because anything that threatens to subvert the Democratic-friendly media and “managerial” class is a positive, period, full stop.
Or even full slop.
Dain Fitzgerald is a writer and “podtuber” in Diamond Springs, California, in the beautiful Gold Country of El Dorado County. His Substack is @mupetblast.
