Is AI the Greatest Art Heist in History?

In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies prance about on stage like supervillains, bragging that their products will eliminate vast swathes of work. Generative AI requires sacrificing the world’s water to feed its hideous data centres. Around the globe, chatbots induce schizophrenic delusions and urge teens to kill themselves – all while turning users brains to mush.

Who could have predicted this? Artists, that’s who.

I am an artist, and 2022 was the year when I first started to see knock-offs of my work. It was not my work exactly. It was instead a strange facsimile, as if done by a none-too-talented teenager on tranquilisers, all my lines and blotches reduced to rote. I quickly learned the reason. AI image generators had scraped my entire body of work off the internet and fed it to their bots, to be excreted out as a product. And it wasn’t just my work; it was everyone’s. Billions of images harvested from the internet without credit, without compensation, without even consent. I saw it as the greatest art heist in history.

The tech lords knew what they were doing. Back in 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claimed that enforcing copyright law would “kill” the entire industry. Tech companies would do what they always did – move fast and break things. The things they were breaking would be us.

Even worse, people seemed utterly unprepared to question it. I remember the 2023 Perugia journalism festival, where the leading lights of our industry go to opine, drink Aperol spritzes and cut their deals. That year the festival was chock full of shills for the tech industry. One after another, they got on stage before massive audiences, and said that newsrooms would have to adopt their employers’ products, or else the newsrooms would be left behind like the proverbial horse and buggy makers. (Walking the Perugia hills on breaks from the conference, I heard these same people tell each other that AI in journalism would eliminate writers, whether writers liked it or not, but they did not mention this in their presentations.) At Perugia, I was scheduled to give a speech about using my own art to document war zones. Instead, I devoted much of it to the threat generative AI companies posed to creative people. I spoke about how they shame their critics as stupid and backward, about how their narrative of inevitability is a way of getting people to comply in advance. Nothing humans do is inevitable, I said. It is all determined by politics, money and power. And if we lacked money and power, perhaps we had politics.

Author Molly Crabapple is an artist and author of Here Where We Live Is Our Country (Bloomsbury).

- The Guardian

Read more...