For over 2 years now we have been experimenting with artificial intelligence image-generating programs. Their power is astonishing. They’re not just good at the technical aspect of creating “art” but appear to be genuinely creative, producing works that not only match the competence of a highly skilled artist but that can be surprising, interesting, and even beautiful.

Of course, everything still depends on the human who is entering the prompt to tell the AI what to do. But nobody who sees these things in action can doubt that we’re entering a very strange new era in which a great deal that could be done by hand will soon be automated.

Many artists are up in arms about the new AI programs—and with good reason. Some are furious that their works have been used as training data without their permission. Others fear that corporate clients will simply turn to machines to do the work that used to be done by human hands. AI is causing the cost of image generation to plummet. In a capitalist economy, where everyone depends for survival on the value of their labor in the marketplace, a massive drop in the value of a skill will cause widespread suffering.

Art is far from the only domain about to be transformed by generative AI. Paralegals, programmers, market researchers, customer-service agents, financial analysts, and many other professions are at risk of seeing much of their work automated in the near future. OpenAI’s hugely successful ChatGPT not only writes bad jokes and slightly better poetry but is even helping to write published research papers. The models are only getting better, too. The newly released GPT4 is already being used to write whole books.

The powers of this new technology are frightening. Scammers are already using the ability to generate realistic “deepfakes” to fool people into thinking their relatives are asking them for money. Credible-looking misinformation can now be produced at lightning speed, an especially unfortunate development at a time when we lack trusted media institutions.

The problem is that new generative AI is being introduced into a capitalist society that is ill-equipped to handle it.

While Noam Chomsky, Gary Marcus, Erik J. Larson, and others have produced convincing arguments that the fear of artificial “superintelligence” coming in the near term is overstated, there are all kinds of ways in which the technology as it already exists can wreak havoc on society.

People are right to be terrified of the disruptions that AI might cause within our lifetimes. But when we think about what those disruptions actually are, it’s clear that the main problem is not actually the development of the technology itself. Introduced under a different economic and political system, few of the risks would be so grave.

The problem is that new generative AI is being introduced into a capitalist society that is ill-equipped to handle it.

Artists, for example, are mostly not afraid of AI because they fear having a machine be better at art. Chess players didn’t stop playing chess when the computer program Deep Blue beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov. And if art is made for pleasure and self-expression, it doesn’t matter what anyone else can do.

The problem is that, in our world, artists have to make a living through their art by selling it, and so they have to think about its market value. We’re introducing a technology that can utterly wreck people’s livelihoods, and in a free-market economic system, if your skills decline in value, you’re screwed.

It’s interesting that we talk about jobs being “at risk” of being automated. Under a socialist economic system, automating many jobs would be a good thing: another step down the road to a world in which robots do the hard work and everyone enjoys abundance. We should be able to be excited if legal documents can be written by a computer. Who wants to spend all day