The Fascism Inherent in Generative AI's "Art"
AI may not be fascist itself, but framing it as "art" certainly is.
I don’t believe using generative artificial intelligence is inherently problematic, outside of its strain on water and energy resources.
I have used it as a research tool, though I am careful when doing so, and compare it against sources I gather manually. I have also used it as a sounding board for ideas, though I rely on my expertise to know when it’s stupid, wrong, and worth disregarding. And beyond its frequency in, yes, getting so much shit wrong, the fact that one of the leading uses of it is as a therapist, and all the other unknown implications of this technology boom, I don’t have any strong opinions on generative AI as a search engine or as a tool for writing your grocery lists.
What I do take issue with however is the kind of jackass who throws prompts into Midjourney and then claims to be an artist. Likewise, I take issue with anyone who thinks that the words, images, and sounds generated by artificial intelligence ought to be framed as “art” in and of themselves, without human input beyond a prompt.
Not only do I take issue with this, but I’d go further and say I think it’s kinda sorta fuckin’ fascist to call generative AI “art” and not what it is: a productivity tool. It can’t make true art, not in any way that adds value to us as a society, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise.
To understand why, let’s hop in a time machine.
Yup, I’m Going There: Literally Fucking Hitler
In 1908, a teenage Adolf Hitler was rejected—for a second time—from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The institute noted that Hitler’s work was not only derivative but seemed incapable of emphasizing anything human in his art.
Instead, Hitler’s watercolor paintings primarily centered on architecture and landscapes. Contemporary art critics note the profound lack of interest in people that Hitler’s work showed.
His rejection from art school put him in a difficult position; instructors noted that his interests and skills might be better served by studying architecture directly, since his best work was composed around buildings. But Hitler was running out of financial resources: He had been living off of a type of orphan’s insurance after his father's death, and in a few years, that money would run out.
With few options and only one craft he’d ever honed, he was all but forced to work professionally as a painter, where he found only limited success and had to supplement his income with odd labor jobs. His work was often deeply derivative of (or, less charitably, copies of) his influences, such as Rudolf von Alt.
But Hitler ultimately lamented that he’d never pursued a career in architecture, referring to his time painting as “mere subsistence work.”
It was during his art career that Hitler was first exposed to antisemitism, then a growing movement in Vienna. However, he hadn’t yet developed his own brand of antisemitic ideology; in fact, part of why he was able to make a living as a painter was due to his business partnership with Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian Jew who owned a store that sold Hitler’s paintings.
Some of Morgenstern’s—and Hitler’s—loyal customers included the Feingold family. Dr. Feingold, a lawyer, bought Hitler’s architectural paintings to hang in his law office. It was corporate lobby art, the kind of inoffensive, forgettable decorative work that might adorn a postcard. And while there’s nothing wrong, evil, or even undesirable about creating uninspired paintings, the work of mere subsistence, it’s also not the kind of thing that evolves art as a discipline that reflects the human experience.
The Feingolds and Morgenstern were later murdered in concentration camps.
By 1914, Hitler had moved to Munich, enlisted in the Bavarian Army, and began serving as a World War 1 dispatch runner.
Unlike painting, this gave Hitler his first taste of success despite Germany’s ultimate defeat: He was decorated for bravery during his military career, and Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, his Jewish superior, recommended Hitler for an Iron Cross, a decoration that someone of Hitler’s rank rarely received.
He considered the war a great experience, one that only reinforced his nationalism and entrenched his belief in the “stab-in-the-back myth”—the idea that the German army was winning, but that the Jews and Marxists at home had given up on the war efforts and humiliated the nation.
After Hitler became a politician, his attitude toward art became more pronounced. He saw modern works of art as degenerate, at odds with a world where all of “art” was subsumed by the classics he enjoyed, a monoculture made in his image and the image of the superior race he believed himself a protector of.
But his attitude toward art also extended into outright censorship. Not only would art in Nazi Germany solely consist of the works Hitler personally appreciated, but it had to be an expression of racial purity. Furthermore, he believed that such art should be accessible to the average (white, German) man; it’s this belief that reveals to us how Hitler really thought about art.
It wasn’t a means of expression, it wasn’t in touch with the individual artist at all, even—art was reduced to mere propaganda, a tool to exalt the heroic, romantic fantasies the Nazis concocted. Art was to be a monolith, a single figure of strength, power, and order.
Understanding how the Nazis felt about art helps us understand how fascism regards art, and in a time when fascism is rearing its ugly head yet again, this is prescient.
The Contradiction of “Art" That Doesn’t Understand Humanity
But before we dig into neofascism and its relationship to art, I want to jump back a bit to Hitler’s work and what kicked off this trot down art criticism’s road.
Remember when I said Hitler’s work was profoundly uninterested in humanity? Well, that was true even of his otherwise technically skillful architectural work, too.
Something that strikes me about Hitler’s architectural paintings is that he seems not to have considered how people would actually interact with these spaces, resulting in proportions that are all kinds of fucked up.
What does it matter if a person couldn’t realistically use the doors and windows he painted when he wasn’t interested in people? His appreciation of architecture was that of the physical world and the physical world alone—a reflection of a belief that empires were built quite literally of brick and stone, cold and indifferent to the human beings who put them together.
While his work was littered with other technical flaws, like a poor understanding of light and shadows, these types of mistakes—in tandem with his general disinterest in painting people—stood out to me. It feels as though they’re not born out of an inability to execute a craft, but an inability to understand humanity.
Hitler’s art, and the ways it’s devoid of humanity such that it teeters into uncanny valley territory, reminded me of another controversy in art, generative AI.
We’re all familiar with early generative AI’s “hand problem.”
In the same way that Hitler may have failed to consider how a body might interact with the world, generative AI also struggles to contextualize human behavior.
Any artist will tell you that rendering a hand is particularly difficult, just like it’s difficult to master any depiction of anatomy. Our bodies are complex and varied, such that applying a “one-size-fits-all” pattern-recognition approach like generative AI can cause some issues.
But beyond our variations in anatomy is the nuance of how we use our bodies.
Even just typing this requires me to make micro adjustments on the fly: Subtle stretches and contractions of the over 30 muscles in each human hand, let alone my wrists, elbows, or shoulders. Combine that with our differing anatomy, lifestyles, technologies, and activities, and you have an endless variety of ways our hands might look.
It’s no wonder that AI, which is fundamentally incapable of understanding the human experience, might struggle to depict the parts of our bodies we most use to interact with the world.
When discussing generative AI, I think we get caught up in questions of its technical ability all too often. Even if you feed it infinite images of hands, and eventually it gets to a point where it can reliably render usable images of hands, it still doesn’t understand the feeling of a hand outstretched, balled tight, brushed against a texture, held by a loved one, or working toward a passion.
What subtleties do we lose in depicting the ways we think, feel, and move about the world when we surrender that process of abstracting our very essence to something—or in the case of a psychopathic narcissist like Adolf Hitler, someone—that neither understands nor has any desire to understand us as people?
This emphasis on pure aesthetics not only results in sterility, it also erases the subjectivity that I’d argue is essential to art.
Hurtling Toward Monoculture Faster Than a Dinosaur-Extincting Asteroid
When I criticize capitalism, I tend to focus on its impact on workers, the alienation workers feel when they labor without ownership or meaningful connection to their work. But one pillar of capitalism that receives less focus is how, as an economic system, it creates incentives to commodify virtually anything that can be commodified.
Many anti-capitalists seek to decommodify an economy; in other words, goods or services are no longer created to be exchanged on a market, but to satisfy human needs.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with that goal (as you might reasonably argue that consumer goods like different kinds of toys or electronics are better served by market forces than a planned economy), most people outside of the most vampiric of right-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist types agree that we should place some limitations on commodification.
Should access to healthcare, housing, and education be treated like commodities—bought and sold like luxury cars? Or should they be guaranteed rights, protected from market forces that would leave many without access? I’d choose the latter, thank you very much.
Likewise, I’d argue that capitalism’s commodification of art has always been a troubling reality with somewhat fascist results that lurch toward a narrower cultural diversity. It’s evident in something like the Disney-fication of film, where formulaic storytelling and flashy effects substitute quality art. And as big and profitable as it all is, it becomes difficult for real artists, with real vision, to compete.
We can also see this in music, where artists are hemmed in by the market’s limitations. New music has to be made with algorithms in mind, subjugated to the “single-first” mindset that barrages listeners with release after release to maintain their attention.
Never mind something like the concept album, the kind of music made to be enjoyed in one big chunk—how could anyone possibly land a spot on the latest Spotify genre playlist with such a ridiculous artistic pursuit? Marketability trumps artistry every time in our capitalist system, and even before generative AI, our technology was already inching towards flatter, homogenous art as a result.
Without structural change to that system, it seems that generative AI is all but inevitably going to reinforce these patterns.
By definition, generative AI can only rely on what came before it. AI defenders will say that the human artist can only draw on what came before them, too, but that’s plainly untrue. We draw on our experiences, our technical skills and limitations, the mediums and processes we use to create, the context in which we live, our complex and evolving emotions, our growth as individuals and as a society.
The result of this love affair with generative AI is the amplification of an already sick system; a system wherein process means nothing, commodity means everything, and it’s acceptable to chew up and spit out all art that came before it if it means making something that sells.
If every student in the world uses generative AI to do their homework assignments without actually understanding or processing that knowledge, does that sound like a desirable world? Does it sound like innovation and creativity, the genuine spark that comes from knowing one thing and synthesizing it with another, will still be at the forefront of how we learn, teach, and develop as a society?
Just as the process of learning would be diluted through widespread adoption and normalization of using generative AI to replace education, the processes behind art would get watered down, too, reduced to remix upon remix upon remix.
This is the kind of monoculture fascists yearn for. Art would no longer reflect the individual within the context of the whole, but simply reinforce what the whole should look and act like. Flattening out the diversity in art turns it into mere propaganda, and regardless of whether intentional or not, that turns art into a reinforcement of cultural norms and expectations, restrained from ever meaningfully challenging them.
Generative AI means no more “happy accidents,” just soulless facsimiles of familiar figures from the past, haunting us like art’s spectre after we’ve killed it once and for all. A culture for all—a derivative monoculture just as Hitler envisioned, albeit certainly more inclusive—that paves over the very things that make us human as if we’re a Walmart parking lot.
What the Fuck Even is Art Anyway?
I’ve read a lot of definitions of art while writing this, and I know this might sound a little pretentious, but I find all of them lacking.
These definitions create constraints that I don’t agree with: That art must be intentional in its expression, but sometimes art is made by accident. Or that it’s anything expressive of ideas or emotions, but I’d say a lot of academic work expresses ideas but isn’t art, and sometimes expressing an emotion is purely factual, too.
Other definitions simply put notable forms on a pedestal, but listing forms out like dancing, painting, and singing doesn’t give us a definition so much as it does a list of similar things without saying what makes them similar.
If you put a gun to my head and forced me to define art, mountainous though such a task may be, I’d say something like this: Art is any act of creation whose main goal or outcome is genuinely resonating with, understanding, or reflecting the human experience.
This definition excludes factual knowledge or arguments, which exist independently of us, but also excludes the natural world, like a beautiful rainbow, which may evoke an emotional response but isn’t an act of creation, merely observation.
It’s why, then, I find it hard to call the slop of generative AI “art” with any weight.
Generative AI doesn’t know what being a human is like. It doesn’t “know” anything, actually, and relies on the vast wealth of human knowledge to mimic knowing.
Generative AI is a shadow puppet of art, just like it is of knowledge, flickering on the walls of Plato’s cave and inhabiting a familiar form without any of the soul, purpose, or meaning. No creation, mere replication.
So, does using AI to help you read and write your emails make you a fascist?
Certainly not, but I’d urge you to question what skills you’re letting atrophy by doing so. Likewise, I don’t believe that generating “art” using AI is sufficient to make someone a fascist—but I would ask that you think about why you feel so entitled to art as a commodity that you’re willing to play into something which so clearly flattens art’s diversity and gouges its spirit right from its heart.
And even if you’re not a fascist yourself, you should know that fascists love generative AI. It devalues creative labor, it’s inherently nostalgic for the past, and it’s a better propaganda tool than a real artist would ever be because it has no hesitation in depicting the depravity of fascist ideologies.
Plus, it lets boneheaded, talentless idiots pretend they’re better than they are—and what are fascists anyway if not our biggest dorks turned hateful idiots due to their inability to accept themselves as they are?
The failed artist that is Hitler, the failed inventor that is Elon Musk, the failed businessman that is Donald Trump. Their ego and failure are projected outward, frustrations weaponized against the world because they are little men with little talent, so naturally, they love this generative AI band-aid that helps them continue to pretend otherwise.
You should also remind yourself that artists are already undervalued.
Artists make art not because it’s the hottest commodity around (that’d be your personal data, thank you very much, Silicon Valley!), but because it is their very essence that drives them like madmen gripped by unshakable visions.
So, even though artists will continue making art for as long as humanity exists, they also do not want to be cast aside as they historically have been by cynical profiteers and fascists who consider their work a degenerate means to an end, a bauble for the unwashed masses.
To that, I say no fucking thank you: We unwashed masses would like to scream from the depths of our souls, create because it’s sometimes all we have, and know what it means to live a life worth living, with all of its ugliness and beauty intact.
Go pay an artist directly. It’ll feel better than filling another shelf with more fast fashion or mindlessly letting a streaming company charge your monthly fee for the “service” of telling you what to watch and listen to.
But, I also don’t want anyone to decide whether they should use generative AI or not based on this essay. Do your own calculations on its cost on our environment, its efficacy as a tool, and its productivity value for your specific use cases, and make that decision yourself.
Just remember that productivity always comes at a cost, and the very spirit of art is a mighty sum to pay. And after all, is this the kind of company you want to find yourself in?
