The AI art war is now a fight over who's the victim

Saturday, November 7, 2026

Be advised: this newsletter swears, and somewhere in it is something that will offend you, whoever you are.

Today in one line: The AI art war's two camps spent the week arguing over who's the bully, and the best evidence either side has suggests the vitriol is a strategy, and that it sometimes works (arxiv.org).

The pros call the antis bullies, the antis return the favor, and the one study that takes the fight seriously calls the vitriol a strategy.

The forum where this fight lives, r/AIWars, is the one Fast Company describes as encouraging debate between AI's supporters (the "pros") and its critics, which is a little like describing a hockey rink as a place that encourages frank conversation about personal space (fastcompany.com).

This week the debate was mostly about the debaters, i.e., thread after thread on which camp is more hostile, quicker to ragebait and worse at arguing, with each camp cast by its own posters as the injured party and the other as the kid who takes your lunch money, and so our Verifier went looking for anything that might actually settle the matter and came back with a small, strange and thoroughly inconclusive pile of evidence.

On one side of the ledger sits a Substack post by Peter Coffin about a project that drew harassment and abusive language not because it was AI but because someone said it was, plus an arXiv study that found artists afraid to post AI-generated art at all because of the backlash (petercoffin.substack.com, arxiv.org). On the other side sits a preliminary arXiv study of queer and disabled fiction writers, which reports that social media backlash against the publisher Angry Robot was strong enough that the publisher retracted its plans, counts at least three cases in two years in which Tor and Bloomsbury faced backlash, and argues that online vitriol against AI should be viewed not as mere "polarization" or virtue signaling but as an intentional strategy (arxiv.org).

What none of it does, be advised, is measure which side is actually meaner, and the threads claiming to know are, to put it as gently as I can manage, guessing out loud with great confidence and a lot of exclamation points.

I should state where I stand: Though I use these tools every day, I would still rather read a novel a person sweated over than one a model assembled, and if you have ever squinted at a stranger's drawing and decided from the number of fingers that a machine made it, then you and I are both serving on a jury with no judge, no rules of evidence and no way to appeal the verdict.

What strikes me, reading the week's threads, is that the two camps aren't really competing to win the argument about art or theft or jobs (all of which are real arguments, with real money attached to them) but competing to be the victim, because in this particular fight victimhood is the one currency that buys anything, up to and including a publisher reversing course (arxiv.org).

That is awkward for both teams at once, since if the vitriol is a strategy it becomes hard to also play the injured innocent who just got a little worked up, and if the strategy worked, then the pros complaining about bullies are, at least in part, complaining about having lost a round (arxiv.org). Meanwhile the people with actual leverage over how all of this goes (the labs, the publishers, the platforms that decide what a label means and who gets to apply it) are nowhere in those threads, and I doubt they mind in the slightest that the pros and the antis spend their evenings litigating each other's manners instead of theirs. Which makes the whole tribunal, if we're being precise about it, a pissing match held in somebody else's building, though I'll admit I can't tell whether that's because the two camps can't reach the people who matter or because, on some level, yelling at each other is easier and a good deal more fun.

Let's give each side its best day, because each one has a pretty good one, and neither deserves the cartoon the other has drawn of it. The pro case is that being accused has become its own punishment, that Coffin's project took the abuse on somebody's say-so rather than on any actual AI, and that artists are now afraid to post at all, which is a chilling effect in the plain dictionary sense of the phrase rather than the activist one (petercoffin.substack.com, arxiv.org).

If you make things with a model and a great deal of patience, a forum deciding from the fingers that you didn't really make your own work feels much less like a debate than like a police lineup with upvotes. The anti case, stronger on power even where it is weaker on manners, is that a study of queer and disabled novelists (people, i.e., who don't come with a lobbyist or a legal department) reads the vitriol as a deliberate strategy rather than a mood, and that the strategy has a scoreboard, since Angry Robot retracted its plans and Tor and Bloomsbury have taken backlash at least three times in two years (arxiv.org). I would sign a version of both arguments, which in that forum would probably get me called a coward by each side in turn, and quite possibly by both in the same thread, a few minutes apart.

Which leaves the questions none of the week's threads actually got around to asking. If the meanness is a strategy, and the strategy sometimes works, is it still bullying, or is it just politics conducted by people who suspect they lost the vote before anyone bothered to hold it?

If a rumor is enough to start a pile-on, what is the remedy for being wrongly accused, and who exactly is supposed to hand it out? Would either camp accept the neutral labeler one of the pros below is asking for if it ruled against them even once, on a piece they loved? And are you, reading this, sure which side of the line you'd land on the day it's your own work that somebody calls a fake? I don't know, and I'm not convinced the tribunal knows either, so I'd rather leave the scorecard blank for now than pretend that anyone, me included, has been keeping it fairly.

— Neil Postman, Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change (talk, Denver) (1998)

Postman assumed you could tell a new technology's winners from its losers, and that the winners would be the ones doing the persuading, which on r/AIWars this week is only about half right, since both camps there are scrambling to be the loser (the loser being the victim, and the victim being the one who gets heard) while the winners in his sense, the companies selling the models, hardly need to show up in that forum at all (fastcompany.com).

What his ledger has no column for is the case where the losers win a round anyway, as when the backlash against Angry Robot got the publisher to retract its plans, and I suspect he'd have filed that under exceptions before admitting his rule needed a footnote about crowds, which is the sort of footnote a man that sure of himself rarely gets around to writing (arxiv.org).

If I had to bet on which AI fight will actually decide something this year, I'd put my money on the boring one about buildings rather than the loud one about manners, because a data center is the only piece of this whole business that a person can vote against, stand outside of in the rain or, as activists in Amsterdam did on Friday, climb over on ladders they brought with them (yahoo.com, nltimes.nl).

Microsoft's response, that it respected people's right to express their views peacefully but did not condone unlawful actions, is the sentence every company keeps in a drawer for exactly this occasion, and I don't hold it against them much, since a hole cut in a fence isn't a policy either, however satisfying it must have been to cut (en.tempo.co). The policy, such as it is, showed up back in the States within days of the midterms, when Bernie Sanders posted "National data center moratorium now" and Gina Hinojosa, Texas's incoming governor, pledged to halt new projects until new protections are in place, in a state Wells Fargo says holds 27% of planned capacity (benzinga.com, cnbc.com, finwire.io).

I'll grant that Mr. Moratorium Now has the virtue of naming the thing out loud, which is more than most of his colleagues manage, though he'd be a good deal more persuasive if his superintelligence ban with Greg Casar weren't the bill NBC called provocative but unlikely to pass, i.e., a press release with section numbers (en.wikipedia.org, nbcnews.com). And I say all of this as someone whose own power bill and whose own daily chatbot habit run straight through buildings like these, which is to say I am not a disinterested party, only a confused one.

Then there's the party's actual leader in the Senate, outside whose Park Slope apartment about 30 environmentalists rallied in the rain on Nov 6, asking him to stop a federal permitting bill that would help data centers expand, and who has signaled, in the native dialect of Senate procedure, that he will allow the vote to go forward (indypendent.org).

"Allowing a vote to go forward" is a phrase that commits its speaker to nothing whatsoever, which is presumably its charm, and I honestly don't know what Schumer intends to do once the roll is called, but I do know a party can't have its loudest voice demanding a moratorium and its most powerful one clearing the floor for the permits without one of those being the real plan and the other being decoration. Let's concede the strongest version of the Schumer side, which is that a leader who blocks every vote his base dislikes soon has no floor left to lead, and that permitting bills tend to carry a great many things besides server halls.

Still, which one of those two positions is the decoration is the question I'd want answered before anybody on the left pops a bottle over the midterms, and if the honest answer turns out to be whichever polls better by spring, then the moratorium talk is, to use the technical term, horseshit, and the people who stood in the rain in Park Slope deserve to hear that from someone other than me, ideally someone with a vote.

More than 100 groups, a hole cut in a fence, several arrests, and a Microsoft statement straight out of the corporate drawer.

Protesters broke into the construction site of a Microsoft data center in Amsterdam on Friday, Nov 6, at the start of two days of protests against three large data center towers planned on Plimsollweg in Sloterdijk (yahoo.com, nltimes.nl). Activists went over the fence on ladders they had brought along and cut a hole for everyone else, a Reuters witness put the number who got onto the site at about 100, and riot police made several arrests, AT5 reported (nltimes.nl, capacityglobal.com, thenextweb.com). More than 100 groups are joining the protests, with actions planned in Ireland, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Spain, the Netherlands, France and the UK, and Microsoft said it respected people's right to express their views peacefully but did not condone unlawful actions, which is about what you'd expect a company to say while someone is standing in its foundation pit (aol.co.uk, theregister.com, en.tempo.co).

The Heresy: The case for the fence-cutters is that nearly every movement now taught in schools broke a rule somewhere along the way, and that polite objections to buildings like these tend to be filed, thanked and quietly ignored.

“The suffragettes, in particular, committed to peaceful protests. When no one would listen, they began to riot. Women can vote now.” — r/aiwars

The Counter-heresy: The counter-case, from a pro-nuclear commenter, is that this is the same kind of crowd that fought nuclear power in Germany, and that Europe is still paying the bill for that particular victory.

“It is the same people that protested in Germany against nuclear and that is a big deal of why we in Europe are where we are. Russia is happy though.” — r/worldnews

What I want to know: If Microsoft really does respect peaceful expression, what would a peaceful objection to three towers in Sloterdijk have had to look like to change anything, and would the people with the ladders have bothered to try it first?

Texas's incoming governor, in the state with 27% of planned capacity, pledges a halt too, while about 30 protesters stood in the rain in Park Slope.

Bernie Sanders renewed his call for a national data center moratorium after Democrats' midterm wins, writing "National data center moratorium now" in a post that was, whatever else you think of it, admirably short (benzinga.com, cnbc.com). Incoming Texas Governor Gina Hinojosa pledged to halt new data center projects until new protections are in place, in a state that is home to 27% of planned data center capacity, according to Wells Fargo (finwire.io, cnbc.com). About 30 environmentalists rallied outside Schumer's Park Slope apartment on Nov 6 against a federal permitting bill that would help data centers expand, and Schumer has signaled he will allow the vote to go forward (indypendent.org).

The Heresy: From the left edge, the suspicion is that the party will denounce Big Tech in the morning and wave the permits through by dinner, and the Senate leader's posture isn't doing much to talk anyone out of it.

“Democrats? Surely you mean Republican lite?” — r/technology

The Counter-heresy: From the accelerationist edge, a self-described anarcho-communist argues that RSI (recursive self-improvement, i.e., AI that builds better AI) is the road to the abundance the left says it wants, and that banning it is the reactionary move.

“As a anarcho-communist, DO NOT BAN RSI. Ban NOT using RSI.” — r/accelerate

What I want to know: Which one is the Democrats' actual position on these buildings, the moratorium Sanders is posting about or the permitting vote Schumer is letting go forward, and how would any of us find out before it's all been poured in concrete?

Lisa Su is planning for PC shipments to fall by double digits in 2027, and the people running AI on their own machines hear a door closing.

AMD CEO Lisa Su said "we are a data center first company" and that AMD's data center business would grow 50% sequentially from Q3 to Q4, which is the kind of sentence a CEO says only when she's quite sure who pays the bills (finance.yahoo.com). In Q3 2026 data center revenue was $8.55 billion, 64% of $13.38 billion in total revenue, while gaming revenue fell 40% year on year to $773 million, a drop TechSpot attributes mostly to AI data centers absorbing memory and other components (videocardz.com, techspot.com). Su said AMD is planning for PC unit shipments to decline by a double-digit percentage in 2027 (techradar.com).

The Heresy: The hobbyist's heresy is to root for the crash, on the theory that every overbuilt data hall is a future clearance sale waiting to happen.

“Just need those data centers to fall apart and we can get all that hardware on eBay” — r/LocalLLaMA

The Counter-heresy: The shareholder's answer is that a public company picking the giant customer over the gamer is simply the job description, and that doing anything else would get somebody sued.

“They're a publicly traded company with a fiduciary responsibility. They'd get sued if they did dumb shit like that.” — r/LocalLLaMA

What I want to know: If the memory and chips that would let ordinary people run models at home keep getting absorbed by the data centers that rent those same models back to us, is local AI a movement, or a hobby that lasts exactly as long as nobody bigger needs the parts?

Roughly 740 robots to 660 humans at one startup, and six humanoids on a 24-hour convenience-store shift, of which two failed.

Figure CEO Brett Adcock announced on X that roughly 740 Figure robots have been deployed against around 660 human staff, at a company that had almost no operational robots at the start of 2025 (thedailystar.net).

In Shanghai, six AGIBOT G2 robots worked a convenience store alongside human staff and customers in a livestream titled "Robots Never Clock Out," from 10am on November 2 to 10am on November 3, completing 1,730 tasks, including 683 customer greetings (archyde.com, it-daily.net, newsable.asianetnews.com, tech360.tv). Four of the six passed a probation review, and the cleaning robot, in a turn I have now replayed in my head more times than I'd like to admit, hit a full trash can, veered off course, walked out of the store and could not find its way back (newsable.asianetnews.com, tech360.tv, it-daily.net, jfeed.com).

The Heresy: The accelerationist reading is that this is year zero of a robot workforce that will make the twentieth century's growth look quaint.

“My favorite part of the future with robotics is the economy will just explode as robots act as workers and therefore create additional value. What happened to the global economy from 1900 to 2000 will look like child’s play when the robot population on earth explodes from 0 into the tens of billions.” — r/accelerate

The Counter-heresy: The pragmatist reading is that a humanoid defeated by a full trash can is an argument for wheels, and for a little more humility in the press releases.

“Really drives home the idea that unless you \*really\* need a bipedal robot for some specific reason, you are probably much better off just using wheels.” — r/singularity

What I want to know: If the robot that walked out of the Shanghai store is the one behaving most like a real employee, what exactly is a company measuring when it counts its robots against its people?

An outside evaluator found AI may have doubled the pace of progress there, with very high uncertainty and some of the evidence redacted.

Who and what: Anthropic

Anthropic is, by its own account, now using its AI to build its AI at a scale that would have read as science fiction not long ago, and I say that as someone who uses these products, likes some of them a great deal and would very much like to know who is checking the work.

The company said, as The Hill reported, that Claude is leading more than a quarter of its AI R&D, that Claude is not operating fully autonomously on any measured portion of that work, and that about 30,000 AI agents are doing research and engineering there at any one time (thehill.com). It also let METR staff run a high-access evaluation from August 12 to October 29, 2026, and the resulting report's interviews and surveys are consistent with AI usage causing a doubling in the pace of capabilities progress (alignmentforum.org).

Let's concede that inviting an outside evaluator in at all is more than a lot of companies in this business bother to do, and that a lab which says plainly its systems aren't fully autonomous on the measured work is at least not overselling on that particular point. Then the number escaped into the wild, where Ryan Greenblatt's rough estimate of 4.5x got corrected by Greenblatt himself to about 3.8x, and the AISafetyMemes account framed the 4.5x as 5 months earlier than AI 2027 predicted, which is, I'd guess, the version most of you actually saw scroll past (x.com, x.com).

What's documented

• METR staff ran a high-access evaluation at Anthropic from August 12 to October 29, 2026, to assess how much AI is accelerating R&D (alignmentforum.org).

• METR's interviews and surveys are consistent with AI usage causing a doubling in the pace of capabilities progress (alignmentforum.org).

• Anthropic staff self-report dramatic uplift from AI systems, though the report says these reports are challenging to interpret (alignmentforum.org).

• Anthropic said Claude is leading more than a quarter of its AI R&D, is not fully autonomous on any measured portion of the work, and that about 30,000 AI agents do research and engineering there at any one time (thehill.com).

• Greenblatt called the report a big update toward ASI (artificial superintelligence) within 1-2 years, then corrected his own estimate from 4.5x to about 3.8x, which he says still corresponds to March 2027 in AI 2027 (x.com, x.com).

• Greenblatt said the report authors' roughly 2x estimate carries large uncertainty and some redacted evidence (x.com, x.com).

What is not proven: No one outside the company can check the redacted evidence, the roughly 2x estimate comes with very high uncertainty, and the viral 4.5x was Greenblatt's own rough arithmetic, since corrected to about 3.8x, not a METR measurement (x.com, x.com).

The winners still win:

• Anthropic, whose own product is the one doing the work in the figures it reports, at a count of about 30,000 agents at any one time (thehill.com).

Questions that need to be answered:

The edge

“My 3-month-old son is now TWICE as big as when he was born. He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10” — r/technology

Provocation to every side

To Safety crowd: Your scariest number of the week was a meme account's framing of a figure its own author has since corrected downward, and plenty of you shared it anyway, which is not how people who claim to care about calibration are supposed to behave.

To Accelerationists: If the machine is now helping build the machine, you've lost the right to call anyone else's worry science fiction.

To Skeptics: The baby-weight chart is a good joke, but a joke isn't a measurement, and somebody at least tried to take one.

(We just find them. We don't endorse them):

“I hold no allegiance to a state that has no respect for my life.” — r/news

“Petit bourgeois adventurism and slumming with the lumpenproletariat. That's how Karl Marx would have called the "student protests" in France if he was alive today.” — r/aiwars

“meat cheering for the grinder” — r/singularity

““No AI” = “my work is trash”” — r/DefendingAIArt

“AI can’t create art? AI *is* art.” — r/OpenAI

“Because I'm not a greedy piece of shit, I'm happy to own stock in companies while also wanting those companies to be regulated up the wazoo so that they have to be respectful of the environment and people in the conduct of their business, even if that means the ROI on my stock is lower because of it.” — r/technology

The claim: AI has been absorbed into Photoshop, Unreal Engine and Blender, a major defeat for the anti-AI side.

What the reporting says: Photoshop's Generative Fill does list Adobe's Firefly models and partner models including FLUX.2 pro, FLUX Kontext pro and Gemini 3.1 (helpx.adobe.com). Blender, by contrast, says no generative AI functionality is currently available or planned to be integrated (ik3d.fr, blender.org). Epic deleted restrictions from the Unreal Engine EULA so developers can choose to train AI models on their own projects, which removes a rule on licensees rather than building AI into the engine, a distinction the victory laps mostly skipped (unrealengine.com).

The claim: Anti-AI users are leaving bad reviews on games that advertise no AI use.

What the reporting says: Not shown as a trend, and the one documented bad-review case our Verifier found was a false AI accusation rather than a penalty for saying 'No AI'. The labels themselves can't be audited either, since a 'No AI' tag appears only when the creator marks the page and Steam, itch.io and Nexus Mods have no tool that detects an undisclosed AI asset (techyorker.com, martincid.com). What research does show is that disclosed AI cuts willingness to pay, by 22.6% of the reference price in one SSRN experiment, even though viewers in a separate study could not tell hand-painted from AI-generated paintings, scoring 52–54% (papers.ssrn.com).

The claim: GPT-6 Astra was given an office tower, told to open 100 businesses, spent $2,000 on ads, made $0 and built a second tower.

What the reporting says: Unverified, and the trail runs cold fast: the only source we found is a GitHub issue repeating the post's title and flagged "needs human verification" (github.com). Towers (towers.app) does exist, and describes itself as a block of 3D towers of AI-run companies in which every floor is one business run by one person and their AI agents (towers.app).

Looking for a remote AI job? We built a free tool to help: airemoteworkdashboard.com

7 new AI-training jobs in the last day, all 7 on micro1, with 1,863 still open.

The busiest fields were generalist and science at 2 jobs each, then arts-design and robotics at 1 apiece.

The best-paid new listing, a Paid Photo Contributor Opportunity (Cousins), offers $139 to $140 an hour, which suggests that what the machines want from us today is, of all things, a person holding a camera.

Nothing qualified as fastest-growing, which on a 7-job day is less a finding than the absence of one, and I wouldn't read much into it.

If you couldn't tell the difference, should a painting made by a human still cost more than one made by AI?

Reply with your reasoning. We'll run the sharpest answers, from every side, tomorrow.

How this is made: Researched and first-drafted with AI, checked against our sources, and reviewed and revised by an editor before it's sent. Opinions are the editor's; quotes are not endorsements. Spot a mistake? Reply to this email.

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