Le dernier turing test : plus con tu meurs.
Ah, t’es une machine ? Alors je dois présenter mes excuses.
February 9, 2025 by Gareth Watkins - It’s embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.
Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labour Party posts, then is forced to take down, a video of its policies as embodied by anthropomorphic animals. A few days later, they promised to “mainline AI into the veins” of Britain.
The right loves AI-generated imagery. In a short time, a full half of the political spectrum has collectively fallen for the glossy, disturbing visuals created by generative AI. Despite its proponents having little love, or talent, for any form of artistic expression, right wing visual culture once ranged from memorable election-year posters to ‘terrorwave’. Today it is slop, almost totally. Why? To understand it, we must consider the right’s hatred of working people, its (more than) mutual embrace of the tech industry and, primarily, its profound rejection of Enlightenment humanism. The last might seem like a stretch, but bear with me.
The first point is the most obvious. ‘AI’ – as embodied by large language models like ChatGPT, and largely diffusion-based image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney – promises to make anyone who can write a single-paragraph prompt into a copywriter or graphic designer; jobs generally associated with young, educated, urban, and often left-leaning workers. That even the best AI models are not fit to be used in any professional context is largely irrelevant. The selling point is that their users don’t have to pay (and, more importantly, interact with) a person who is felt to be beneath them, but upon whose technical skills they’d be forced to depend. For relatively small groups like Britain First, hiring a full-time graphic designer to keep up with its insatiable lust for images of crying soldiers and leering foreigners would clearly be an unjustifiable expense. But surely world leaders, capable of marshalling vast state resources, could afford at the very least to get someone from Fiverr? Then again, why would they do even that, when they could simply use AI, and thus signal to their base their utter contempt for labour?
For its right wing adherents, the absence of humans is a feature, not a bug, of AI art. Where mechanically-produced art used to draw attention to its artificiality – think the mass-produced modernism of the Bauhaus (which the Nazis repressed and the AfD have condemned), or the music of Kraftwerk – AI art pretends to realism. It can produce art the way right wingers like it: Thomas Kinkade paintings, soulless Dreamworks 3D cartoons, depthless imagery that yields only the reading that its creator intended. And, vitally, it can do so without the need for artists.
Javier Milei, a prodigious user of AI-generated art, wants Argentinians to know that any of them could join the 265,000, mostly young people who have lost jobs as a result of the recession that he induced, to the rapturous praise of economic elites. He wants to signal that anyone can find themselves at the wrong end of his chainsaw, even if doing so means producing laughably bad graphics for the consumption of his 5.9 million deeply uncritical Instagram followers.
Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”
On the subject of Instagram, anyone old enough to read this will also be old enough to remember when Mark Zuckerberg, and by extension the rest of Silicon Valley, was broadly perceived as liberal. ‘Zuck’ was even touted as the only presidential candidate who could beat Donald Trump. (It’s worth noting that as Zuckerberg has drifted to the right he has also started dressing badly, a fact which we will return to later.) But even Zuck can’t make AI happen. The weird AI-powered fake profiles that Meta deployed in 2023 were quietly mothballed six months later, and would have disappeared from history completely, had Bluesky users not found some that had escaped deletion. This appears to be the fate of all commercial AI projects: at best, to be ignored but tolerated, when bundled with something that people actually need (cf: Microsoft’s Co-pilot); at worst, to fail entirely because the technology just isn’t there. Companies can’t launch a new AI venture without their customers telling them, clearly, “nobody wants this.”
And yet they persist. Why? Class solidarity. The capitalist class, as a whole, has made a massive bet on AI: $1 trillion dollars, according to Goldman Sachs – a figure calculated before the Trump administration pledged a further $500 billion for its ‘Project Stargate’. While previous bets on the Metaverse and NFTs didn’t pay off, their bet on cryptocurrency has paid off spectacularly – $3.44 trillion dollars, at the time of writing, have been created, effectively out of thin air. All of the above technologies had heavy buy-in from the political right: Donald Trump co-signed an NFT project and a memecoin; the far-right, shut out of conventional banking, uses cryptocurrency almost exclusively. This isn’t just about utility, it’s about aligning themselves with the tech industry. The same is true of their adoption of AI.
OpenAI is unable to make money on $200 subscriptions to ChatGPT. Goldman Sachs cannot see any justification for its level of investment. Sam Altman is subject to allegations of sexually abusing his sister. ‘Slop’ was very nearly word of the year. And then, to top it all off, the open-source DeepSeek project, developed in China, wiped $1 trillion off the US stock market overnight.
In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the allies it can get. And it can’t afford to be picky. If the only places that people are seeing AI imagery is @BasedEphebophile1488’s verified X account – well, at least it’s being used at all. The thinking seems to be that, if it can hang on long enough in the public consciousness, then, like cryptocurrency before it, AI will become ‘too big to fail’. Political actors like Tommy Robinson won’t be the ones to make that call, but they can normalise its use, and Robinson certainly moves in the digital circles of people who can offer the AI industry far more concrete help. Just as we might donate to a GoFundMe, the capitalist class will provide mutual aid in the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and attempting to normalise AI by using it. This process of normalisation has led to the putatively centre-left Labour government pledging vast sums to AI infrastructure. If one of the key features of the Starmerite tendency is their belief that only conservative values are truly legitimate, their embrace of AI and its aesthetics may be part of this.
The capitalist class will provide mutual aid to the AI industry in the form of billions in investment, adding AI to their products, and attempting to normalise AI by using it.
We have seen how sensitive the tech industry’s leaders are to criticism. Marc Andreessen’s techno-optimist manifesto, when not conferring sainthood upon deeply evil figures like Nick Land, largely consists of its writer begging the world to love him. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent interview with Joe Rogan featured lengthy sections on how he does not feel validated by the press and governments. Just as when they reach out to ‘cancelled’ celebrities, the right is now proactively creating an alliance with the tech industry by communicating that, even if they can’t materially support companies like OpenAI, they can at least offer emotional support. We may all be good materialists, but we can’t underestimate the effects that non-material support has in creating networks within capital.
No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that, I want to argue, is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it.
There was a time when reactionaries were able to create great art – Dostoyevsky, G.K Chesterton, Knut Hamsun, and so on – but that time has long passed. Decades of seething hatred of the humanities have left them unable to create, or even think about, art. Art has always been in a dialectical push and pull between tradition and the avant garde: ‘art is when there is a realistic picture of a landscape, or a scene from Greek mythology’ versus ‘a urinal can be art if an artist signs it’. The goal of the avant-garde, as their name suggests, has been to expand art’s territory, to show that Rothko’s expanses of colour, or Ono’s instructional paintings, can do what Vermeer’s portraits can, and do it just as well. There was even a time when the right partook in this, the Italian Futurists being a prime example. There were, at one point, writers like Céline and artists like Wyndham Lewis, who not only produced great work, but developed and pushed forward the avant-garde styles of their day. Are there any serious artists on the right today who do not parlay in nostalgia for some imagined time before art was ‘ruined’ by Jews, women, and homosexuals? Perhaps only Michel Houellebecq, and he is long past his two-book prime.
The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone with bullshit in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.
Art has rules – like the rules of the physical universe they are sufficiently flexible to allow both Chopin and Merzbow to be classed as music, but they exist, and even internet memes are subject to those rules. The most burnt-out shitpost is still part of a long tradition of outsider sloganeering stretching back through 60s comix to Dada and Surrealism. They aren’t nothing, and if they’re ugly then, often, they’re ugly in an interesting, generative way. A person made them ugly, and did so with intent. 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. Even the most depraved Power Electronics acts or the most shocking performances of the Viennese Actionists had something more to them than simply causing suffering for its own sake. 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.
If art is the establishing or breaking of aesthetic rules, then AI art, as practiced by the right, says that there are no rules but the naked exercise of power by an in-group over an out-group. It says that the only way to enjoy art is in knowing that it is hurting somebody. That hurt can be direct, targeted at a particular group (like Britain First’s AI propaganda), or it can be directed at art itself, and by extension, anybody who thinks that art can have any kind of value. It can often be playful – in the way that the cruel children of literary cliché play at pulling the wings off flies – and ironised; Musk’s Nazi salute partook of a tradition of ironic-not-ironic appropriation of fascist iconography that winds its way through 4Chan (Musk’s touchpoint) and back into the countercultural far right of the 20th century.
AI imagery looks like shit. But that is its main draw to the right. if AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, they wouldn’t want it.
I would not be the first to observe that we are in a new phase of reaction, something probably best termed ‘postmodern conservatism’. The main effect of this shift has been to enshrine acting like a spoilt fifteen-year-old boy as the organising principle of the reactionary movement. Counter-enlightenment thought, going back to Burke and de Maistre, has been stripped of any pretence of being anything but a childish tantrum backed up by equally childish, playground-level bullying. It is, and has always been, “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas,” and to ‘post-liberal’ ‘intellectuals’, that is in fact a good thing – if anything, they believe, the postmodern right needs to become more absurd; it needs to abandon Enlightenment ideals like reason and argumentation altogether.1 The right wing intellectual project is simply to ask: ‘what would have to be true in order to justify the terrible things that I want to do?’ The right wing aesthetic project is to flood the zone – unsurprisingly, given their scatological bent, with bullshit – in order to erode the intellectual foundations for resisting political cruelty.
Truth does not set you free. Once you know that 2+2=4, that the capital of the Netherlands is The Hague and not Amsterdam, or that immigration is a net economic positive for Britain, then you are forever bound to that truth. Your world has become, in some respects, smaller, your options diminished. If it would be more enjoyable – because this is, at the end of the day, about enjoyment – to create your own truth then you are out of luck. Combine truths with a concern for human life and thriving, and suddenly rules start to proliferate: we have established the truth that heating milk reduces the bacteria and viruses in it that can harm human beings, which is undesirable to us, therefore we must heat all milk that is sold. A lot of people are fine with this, accepting small impositions on their freedom in the name of the greater freedom from disease. Some are not.
There is no reason, of course, that any rule made in the name of Enlightenment humanism should be necessarily good: liberal politics, Labour’s current mania for austerity, or the interminable justifications for the Iraq war, are often framed as being based on reason and humanism while being anything but. If you’ve been subject to computer-says-no rules governing your access to the basic necessities of life, then you’ll know how easy it is to disguise arbitrary and highly politicised whims as laws of nature, as ironclad as A = π r². The application of rationality and compassion in the real world brings to mind the (likely apocryphal) Ghandi quote about Western civilisation: “I think it would be a good idea.”
The right is a libidinal formation; it is, for many of its proponents, especially those who aren’t wealthy enough to materially benefit from it, a structure in which to have fun. A hobby, almost. Sartre’s injunction to remember that antisemites are primarily “amusing themselves”2 is true of most – perhaps all – right wing discourse, no matter how serious it seems or how terrible its real-world effects. As such, the right are strongly averse to any sort of reality-testing. It is, to them, beside the point whether anything they say stands up to the tests developed by the sciences and humanities, including those which determine (insofar as such a determination can be made) whether a piece of art is ‘good’, or at least serious. When they do invoke objectivity, it is misplaced, and as deeply naïve as their artistic output, premising their objection to the existence of trans people on ‘basic biology’, when not only can biology not define ‘woman’, it is having difficulty deciding what a fish or vegetable is. Serious engagement with the world as it is – with the facts that emphatically don’t care about your feelings – doesn’t often, if ever, yield the simple explanations that the right require. In the face of this complexity, most people will conclude that it is best to be humble: What is a woman? No idea, don’t really care, but let’s act in a way that causes the least suffering. But the right seem incapable of doing this. Despite all their absurdist posturing, they struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories. They want to assert, simultaneously, that unambiguous laws govern all aspects of being, while acting as though ‘truth’ is whatever they want or need it to be at any given moment.
Despite all their absurdist posturing, the right struggle to come to terms with a contradictory world that does not conform to their pre-decided categories.
Gender revanchism is one of the main organising principles of the postmodern right, and much everyday AI usage demonstrates a particularly gendered form of cruelty: deepfake nudes, AI ‘girlfriends’ used as a rhetorical cudgel to show real women that they are being replaced, AI ‘art’ of Taylor Swift being sexually assaulted. It’s no coincidence that the internet’s largest directory of deepfakes uses Donald Trump as a mascot. These attitudes are reflected in the upper echelons of the tech and AI industry. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – the man we are being told is a generational talent, a revolutionary, on a par with Steve Jobs or Bill Gates – is also, allegedly, a rapist and paedophile, who considered his own sister his sexual property since she was three years old, and who responded to allegations by lamenting that “caring for a family member who faces mental health challenges is incredibly difficult.” A love of sexual violence is a key part of the identity of the contemporary right, and it is no coincidence that, the further right one goes, the more likely one is to encounter open celebration of rape and, particularly, paedophilia. Altman’s legal trouble will, for many on the right, only confirm that he is one of them. Meanwhile, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Mark Zuckerberg described the tech industry as “culturally neutered” and called for more “masculine energy” and “aggression”.
Let’s return to Zuckerberg’s clothing. It was he that established the ubiquitous ‘grey hoodie’ style for tech CEOs. But recently he has begun to exhibit a new style. Oversized t-shirts emblazoned with ‘It’s either Zuck or Nothing’ in Latin, the unwieldy lines of his Meta AI glasses, a gaudy and unnecessary gold chain. This isn’t taking risks with fashion, like Rick Owens or Vivienne Westwood. It’s just ugly and stupid. Zuckerberg is also significantly more muscular than he used to be, despite doing nothing in his life that would seem to require a bodybuilder physique. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that, as he embraces corporate incelism and AI, he has felt liberated to ignore what does and doesn’t look good, choosing instead to display that he is wealthy and powerful enough to look terrible if he wants. All the emperor has to do, when the child laughs at his nudity, is ignore them. Trump’s haircut, which we all seem to have become inured to, serves the same purpose. It looks like shit and that’s the point. It is a display of power and a small act of cruelty.
The Cybertruck – itself a work of anti-art that could only be the product of a mind addled by the far right – failed, largely because it is embarrassing to be seen in one.
AI is a cruel technology. It replaces workers, devours millions of gallons of water, vomits CO2 into the atmosphere, propagandises exclusively for the worst ideologies, and fills the world with more ugliness and stupidity. Cruelty is the central tenet of right wing ideology. It is at the heart of everything they do. They are now quite willing to lose money or their lives in order to make the world a crueller place, and AI is a part of this – a mad rush to make a machine god that will liberate capital from labour for good. (This is no exaggeration: there is a lineage from OpenAI’s senior management back to the Lesswrong blog, originator of the concept of Roko’s Basilisk.) Moreso even than cryptocurrency, AI is entirely nihilistic, with zero redeeming qualities. It is a blight upon the world, and it will take decades to clear up the mountains of slop it has generated in the past two or three years.
AI is, unfortunately, a fever that will have to burn itself out. It may be the case that, like cryptocurrency, elites are simply so invested in this technology that, despite its total lack of utility, they will keep trying to make it happen. Given how great a fit it is for them psychologically, I would say that this is more likely to happen than not. However, as we saw in those two brief weeks of last year’s US election campaign, the right wing psyche is incredibly fragile. For some reason, they are able to process any inversion of empirical reality, but are acutely sensitive to being laughed at. Calling them weird absolutely works, and telling them their sole artistic output looks like shit also works. Laughing at people who treat AI art as in any way legitimate works. Talking about AI’s environmental impact or its implications for the workforce will not work - they like that, it makes them feel dangerous. Instead of talking about taking money from artists, talk about how it makes them look cheap. If hurting and offending people is part of the point, then we can take that fun away from them by refusing to express hurt or offence, even if we feel it.
Technological progress isn’t linear, and it’s not wholly undemocratic. We, ordinary people, stopped Google Glass from being widely released because we mocked its users, calling them ‘glassholes’. The Cybertruck – itself a work of anti-art that could only be the product of a mind addled by the far right – failed, largely because it is embarrassing to be seen in one. We have already seen that the AI industry is vulnerable – it was possible for Chinese grad students to build the same thing for a fraction of the price, calling into question the entire model of growth through massive investment in data centres. The left is powerless across much of society, but a training in ruthless criticism of all that exists has made us masters of negativity, while always keeping one eye on the better world that is possible when the slop has been cleared away. Our most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”
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