Soft Violence in AI Art Discourse｜Vancouver AI Meetup Jan 2026 Erica Deconstructs Anti‑AI

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In this Vancouver AI community meetup talk, artist Erica Lapadat Janzen shares how a single AI-assisted art post on Threads spiraled into an 800+ reply anti–AI dogpile. Drawing on her background in new media art, she treats the comments as data, coding them into categories like identity attacks, process policing, and moral framing to reveal what she calls the “soft violence” of AI discourse. Instead of genuine ethics or platform critique, she shows how much of the conversation works as informal social punishment—policing who counts as a “real” artist and what kinds of tools and labor are considered legitimate. Erica argues that AI didn’t create this behavior, it amplified pre‑existing fragilities in artistic identity and power, and calls for building healthier cultures and communities around AI rather than just better models.
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