Is artificial intelligence the greatest art theft in history? | Artificial Intelligence (AI)

IIn 2026, it will be easy to see why generative AI is bad. The Internet called his secretion “ramp.” CEOs of AI companies wander around the stage like supervillains, bragging that their products will eliminate large swaths of work. Generative AI requires sacrificing the world’s water to feed hideous data centers. All over the world, chatbots are stimulating schizophrenic delusions and urging teens to kill themselves — all while turning users’ brains into mush.

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

I’m an artist, and 2022 was the year I first started seeing replicas of my work. It wasn’t exactly my job. It was instead a strange replica, as if it had been done by a not-so-talented teenager on tranquilizers, and all my lines and blemishes had turned into routine. I quickly learned why. AI image generators have scraped all of my work off the internet and fed it to their robots, to be spun out as a product. And it wasn’t just my job; It was for everyone. Billions of images collected from the Internet without credit, without compensation, without even consent. I saw it as the greatest art theft in history.

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

Worse still, people seemed completely unwilling to question it. I remember the 2023 Perugia Press Festival, where the bigwigs of our industry go to talk, sip Aperol, and do their deals. That year the festival was full of encouragement for the technology industry. One by one, they took to the stage in front of huge audiences and said that newsrooms must embrace the products of their employers, or else newsrooms would be left out like the proverbial horse-and-carriage makers. (As I walked through the hills of Perugia on breaks from the conference, I heard these same people telling each other that AI in journalism will kill writers, whether writers like it or not, but they didn’t mention it in their presentations.) In Perugia, I was scheduled to give a speech about using my own art to document war zones. Instead, much of it is devoted to the threat that AI companies pose to creators. I talked about how they expose their critics as stupid and backwards, and how their narrative of determinism is a way to get people to comply beforehand. I said: Nothing humans do is inevitable. It is all determined by politics, money and power. If we lacked money and power, we might have politics.

Seeking to combat the tech industry’s rhetoric, journalist Marissa Mazria-Katz and I launched an open letter, with the modest request to keep AI-generated images out of newsrooms. It has attracted thousands of signatures from all over the world. Other artists resisted in more forceful ways. In January 2023, three animators filed a lawsuit against leading image production companies Midjourney and Stability AI. Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKiernan, and Carla Ortiz have all seen the Internet filled with copycats of their work. Their complaint alleged that the two companies “violated the rights of millions of artists.” (The lawsuit is disputed and is still ongoing.)

Not only were we creatives seeing our work being taken away, it was being appropriated by some of the richest people on the planet, with outright contempt.

In 2024, Mira Moratti, chief technology officer at OpenAI, told an interviewer that the creative jobs destroyed by her company’s product probably “were never meant to exist in the first place.”

Such attacks on art only reveal the deep anti-humanism of the technological elite. They are a group that eschews human interaction, with all its coincidences, inconveniences, and joys. It represents friction. Learning to make art is also friction. It doesn’t matter that friction is the basis of all pleasure, whether you mean the friction of a pen against a paper, or the friction of your lover’s lips with yours..

It’s been three years since Marissa and I launched our open letter. Artificial intelligence has torn apart the already fragile illustration industry. Many of my colleagues are unemployed. Worse still, beginner’s illustration shows, where young artists once learned their craft, have been wiped out. The same process occurs in countless creative industries. We have been replaced by digital humans trained on our stolen creations. No, work isn’t good, but that doesn’t matter. Generative AI is a tool to discipline and then eliminate the human factor. The audience will just have to get used to it. This is sold as an advance.

When technophiles want to demonize resistance, they invoke the non-lights. By their telling, the Luddites were primitive idiots, smashing machines they were too stupid to understand. But history tells a different story. As told by Brian Merchant’s brilliant work Blood in the Machine., The Luddites were skilled craftsmen, fighting for their way of life against “satanic factories” – textile sweatshops run by semi-slaves. Banned from joining unions, the Luddites smashed machines as a protest tactic. They were not lost to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical strength. The government called in the troops, and the Luddites were executed or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.

Artists are also fighting for a way of life. If we are too disorganized to achieve victory, it will be everyone’s loss. The inappropriate abstraction of AI companies may have started with the work of illustrators like me, but it has evolved to include everything else. This extends to the billions of dollars these companies waste every year, to the carbon they burn, to the rare metals in their chips, to the land on which their data centers are located, to culture, education, the mind, and our imagination itself. Against the entire human and non-human world, the technology tycoons can only offer us a dystopia. Their imaginary future contains no meaningful work and no real communities, just robots talking to each other, leaving us with nothing.

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

Further reading

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant (Little, Brown US, £25)

Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, by Cory Doctorow (Verso, £22)

Technological Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism by Yanis Varoufakis (Bodley Head, £19.95)