I’ve been biting my tongue on this topic in hopes that somebody else would bring this forward but alas eons have passed without a peep.
I’ve been inquisitive about the concept of privacy and digital rights advocacy in the form of art for a while. If you take a cursory glance at major points of activism you’ll see the arts have played a major role in causes, with conscious rap immediately coming to mind. The general consensus is that privacy is foundational to other human rights. Yet the gap in representation is actually quite head scratching. Then again, this is a niche of a niche so I’m not too surprised.
I understand digital rights as a whole is very complex but art has the ability to condense nuance into something more personal. I think a lot more people who are normally complacent with the status quo would at least be willing to engage with the discourse if there was more representation.
I think this is exactly why the Clippy movement was so successful because it allowed people to personify their frustrations about the rampant and often arbitrary injection of AI by turning it into something that is not just a smug copy pasta manifesto.
I’d argue in many ways in this twisted timeline that if you are a creative and are anti big tech or a digital anarchist or anything of that sort you are well aware that a high key war is waged on your essence in the form of GenAI. What better way to combat this than by creating the counterculture?
Am I on to something here or am I tripping?
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Tripping, my essense is not threatened by GenAI.
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I’d even go as far and say that AI can help with privacy if you do it right. Some small local AI models right now are on the same level as SOTA models 1-2 years back. You can run them on your system and nothing has to leave it for a lot of tasks.
As with many things it’s not the technology itself that is inherently evil, it’s how evil companies create them and how they force people to use it.
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It’s true that many people resent technological captivity. I feel like I should teach digital freedom, but it takes a lot of consistent work from the person learning it. It can also be difficult when all you do is point out what they are doing wrong, even if it’s accurate.
Some friends know about this and are actually interested, having improved since knowing me. I’ve pulled back from trying to teach random people though. I need ideas on how to share this knowledge because most efforts haven’t worked except with a small group who genuinely care about my perspective.
OK, I think this was poor wording on my part. My point wasn’t about generative AI specifically I more so using it as an example for people’s frustration with big tech and creating the counter culture I was more so trying to emphasize the lack of representation (to my knowledge as I don’t really pay attention to mass media anymore) of issues like privacy, right to repair under art like music and illustrations instead of just technical content and blogs , etc. I was asking if I was tripping over that as a concept
it is in the sense that it is actively stealing your work and AI slop taking attention away from your potential demographic but I will say AI can’t innovate like humans do if you think that’s going to replace you artistically maybe there wasn’t much there to begin with
Hit hard with this one. When people say they hate a certain technology they likely only been exposed to it from the corporate context and have a skewed perspective I think a good example of this is social media and smartphones. The fediverse feels way cooler and productive than their big tech equivalents and because of the way its built its almost enshittification resistant and smartphones wouldve been so cool if they werent all trying to homogenously be an iPhone
this is all dependent on your motivations and perspective. There are reasons to want privacy that aren’t being discussed enough
Preservation of authenticity, spiritual practice, the impact of surveillance on mental health, experimenting with business ideas and the list never stops
Going based on technical jargon will only interest technical people and while I’m a fan of nerd talk the pertinence of this particular subject is a much a larger scope then people realize so in my opinion every angle in this field matters all I can say is make it personal.
Maybe I should be taking my own advice tho 
On one end I think that a ton of sci fi already explored the issues that were dealing with in the digital rights space. That’s not new. Maybe I’m misinterpreting, but I think you may be asking about art concerning digital rights as a form of activism. To that I say that the digital rights movement is growing, but is still small. So I think the art community is smaller still. As the former grows, hopefully so does the latter. Maybe someone just has to be inspired.
Anywho, here is the closest example to what I think you’re talking about off the top of my head.
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