I had blinked at the aesthetic poverty of the most recent pitch for Meta’s Horizon Worlds VR game, featuring Mark Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed cartoon avatar against a visual background that one Twitter wag charitably compared to “the painted walls of an abandoned day-care center.” I had let out a quiet sigh at the news of Ring Nation, an Amazon-produced TV show featuring “lighthearted viral content” captured from the Ring surveillance empire. I had clenched my jaw at a screenshot of the Stable Diffusion text-to-image model offering up AI artworks in the styles of dozens of unpaid human artists, whose collective labor had been poured into the model’s training data, ground up, and spit back out.

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