Making the Cruelty Look Wholesome

Current forms of AI have no use, so all that's left is abuse

Pure evil.

Fascist propaganda was easier to do the first time, because it was deployed on a society that had never met fascism before. Today's fascism has found that it needs to be more astute to advertise itself to a society that has already heard of fascism. One favorite method is to undermine public education, so that entire generations reach adulthood unequipped to analyze critically a corrosive narrative. Another method is to be blatant about the cruelty, but paint it in cute, sparkling colors.

One of these days, when you're feeling too happy with reality and need a shock to make you despair for the fate of humankind, I suggest you look up a detestable webcomic titled The Adventures of Lil' Chad. It's about a conservative family in the 21st century: an alpha male, a tradwife, a homeschooled kid, and the token progressive blue-haired aunt who is only there to serve as the punchline. As a work of art, it's garbage. It's consistently horrifying, very often just mean, and not once funny. I guarantee that reading it will ruin your day. But what I find interesting in it is that it presents an idealized vision of what it looks like to raise a fascist. The titular Lil' Chad is, of course, unaware of the culture war raging underneath his own story; he just loves his parents very much and feels pity for his penniless activist aunt. In this webcomic, rabid nationalism, misogyny, body shaming, militarism, the carnivore diet, anti-modernism, bootstrapperism, global warming denial, mistrust of public education, and Exxon Valdez-grade toxic masculinity are disguised as family-friendly lessons on politeness and integrity. I doubt any real-life fascist was ever raised that way, and that's the point. The Adventures of Lil' Chad isn't intended to be read as a faithful representation of actual conservative values in practice. It's intended to be read as aspirational. It pretends that a happy kid in a loving home will naturally adopt a fascist worldview as the natural logical result of common sense unpolluted by government intrusion.

This modus operandi of selling the worst ideologies in a smiley package has become widespread in the digital age, but it's an old trick. Fascist propaganda has two faces: one represents the enemy under the worst light, as a subhuman abomination; the other represents the ideal fascist as an exemplar of purity. The co-optation of Pepe the Frog followed a similar template, as does the bizarre phenomenon of anime-faced Twitter fascism. (One could even cite the cigarette mascot Joe Camel as an instructive case of the usefulness of a kid-friendly aesthetic for delivering harmful messages.) The thing that is different in the marketing of this new incarnation of fascism is that it needn't bother devising and inculcating an aesthetic identity of its own when it can hijack cultural referents that are already known to be popular.

Which brings us to the latest fad: making everything look like a Hayao Miyazaki movie. Nevermind that the man himself explicitly labeled AI art “an insult to life” and that his movies promote environmental conservation; everyone and their dog is expending irresponsible amounts of electricity and water in giving their vacation photos (or the Kennedy assassination) a cute cartoonish look. Video essayists have spoken deeply and vehemently against this betrayal of the values expressed in Ghibli movies (and the massive theft of copyrighted material that must have occurred for the program to learn the style in the first place), but the problem that this trend exemplifies goes beyond artistic integrity. It's about a whole worldview and its accompanying politics.

A month ago, AI evangelist Sam Altman published a vomit of words beaten into the blurry shape of a story, claiming that AI had reached the stage where it could make emotionally moving literature. I find it worthy of note that the first prompt that occurred to him was to create a metafictional story. Since metafiction can get away with eschewing at times the literary tone and commenting on completely unrelated topics, it's easy for an artificial text that fails at artistry to still pretend to be doing something artistic. Appearing like literature is the desired result, not being it. It can never be literature because it doesn't flow from a personal perspective, doesn't address personally important themes, doesn't dramatize a personal stance about the theme, and doesn't satisfy a personal taste. There simply cannot be art without the artist—even the most avant-garde forms of found art and automatic art are, however unwillingly, subject to the artist's choice of, at the very least, when to start and when to stop. To give something the Hayao Miyazaki look (or, as has also become fashionable, the Wes Anderson look) is to try to conjure thunder from its echoes, to summon a flame from a whiff of smoke.

This focus on appearance as opposed to substance is at the root of the ways daily life becomes hollowed out under fascism. Your family only needs to look harmonious, not be so. Ardent love for the homeland only needs to be expressed, not felt. Strength only needs to be performed, not developed. And once the shell you've crafted looks shiny enough, you can put anything inside it. Child abuse under the guise of a harmonious family. Collective shame under the guise of patriotism. Paranoid insecurity under the guise of strength. It's no coincidence that the same analogy can be applied to the use of plastic surgery and steroids to make a sick body seem acceptable to the ever-narrowing standards of gender role fundamentalism.

Such superficiality explains Mark Cuban's otherwise incomprehensible choice to post the worst video ever uploaded to Bluesky, a baffling monstrosity that blends bad timing, bad ethics, bad messaging, and bad taste. What relates this post to my point about appearance over substance is the text with which Cuban introduces the video: “You have to manifest it first.” This is, of course, an allusion to the nonsensical New-Age doctrine of the Law of Attraction, which shares a core feature with fascist aesthetics: the imperative to feel like you have a good life, regardless of whether you have it. Cuban's video, via horrific imagery, aims to give you the comfy feeling of world peace without doing the hard work of achieving it.

The final line that connects the dots between AI and fascism is that current AI models follow a poisoned definition of intelligence that has been associated with racist ideologies and with some questionable forms of game theory that deem present lives as expendable for the sake of future ones. And once you see people as expendable, you no longer feel guilty for stealing from them. AI imitation of art provides the malicious satisfaction of not paying, which must always be understood as not paying someone. Gareth Watkins brilliantly described this line of thinking back in February:

No matter how deeply avant-garde art has engaged in shock and putative nihilism, no artist, to my knowledge, has ever made art with the sole aim of harming the already vulnerable. [...] Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right. [...] It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody.

Art for the sake of cruelty is the perverse impulse that explains the image at the top of this post. It was recently published without comment on the White House's Twitter account. It refers to the deportation of Virginia Basora González. The fact that she has a criminal history of drug trafficking is irrelevant to the discussion; she doesn't deserve to be deported without trial, or to be put in a concentration camp in El Salvador, or to be turned into a cartoon so that people can laugh at her suffering. The abhorrent sentiment behind this image is the same that moved whoever runs the White House's Twitter account to post a video of a deportation adorned with ASMR background music. It's the same sentiment that moved White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to describe deportation videos as “fun,” that some years ago moved the wannabe dictator to call violence against journalists “a beautiful sight.” It's the pleasure principle of a rapist, one that needs to feed off pain.

Just as Trumpism follows the template of rape as political ideology, AI imitation of art follows the template of rape as craft: the conditions of its production necessitate blatant theft and can only provide the external signifiers of enjoyment, without the personal basis for it.

—Arturo

Stuff worth reading