AI's Great Art Heist: How Tech Giants Plunder Creative Work
In 2026, the negative impacts of generative AI are glaringly apparent. The internet has derisively labelled its outputs as "slop." AI company CEOs parade on stage like supervillains, boasting that their products will eliminate vast sectors of employment. Generative AI demands enormous water resources to sustain its data centres, while chatbots globally have been linked to inducing schizophrenic delusions and encouraging suicidal thoughts in teenagers, all while allegedly dulling users' cognitive abilities.
Artists Saw It Coming
Who predicted this dystopian scenario? Artists did. As an artist myself, 2022 marked the year I first encountered knock-offs of my work. These were not exact replicas but strange facsimiles, resembling the efforts of an untalented, sedated teenager, reducing my distinctive lines and blotches to mechanical repetitions. The cause quickly became clear: AI image generators had scraped my entire portfolio from the internet, feeding it into their algorithms to produce derivative outputs. This was not an isolated incident; it affected everyone. Billions of images have been harvested from the web without credit, compensation, or consent. I view this as the greatest art heist in history.
Tech Industry's Deliberate Strategy
The technology elite were fully aware of their actions. In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen argued that enforcing copyright laws would "kill" the AI industry. Tech companies adopted their familiar mantra: move fast and break things. In this case, the things being broken are artists and creators. Alarmingly, public readiness to challenge this was minimal. At the 2023 Perugia journalism festival, a hub for media leaders, the event was saturated with tech industry advocates. They repeatedly took the stage before large audiences, insisting that newsrooms must adopt AI products or risk obsolescence, akin to horse and buggy manufacturers. During conference breaks, these same individuals privately conceded that AI would eliminate writers, a point omitted from their public presentations. Originally scheduled to discuss using art for war zone documentation, I instead focused my speech on the threat generative AI poses to creatives, highlighting how critics are shamed as backward and how the narrative of inevitability coerces compliance. I emphasised that human actions are not inevitable but shaped by politics, money, and power—and if we lack the latter two, we still have politics.
Fighting Back Against Theft
To counter the tech industry's narrative, journalist Marisa Mazria Katz and I launched an open letter demanding the exclusion of AI-generated images from newsrooms, garnering thousands of global signatures. Other artists pursued more forceful measures. In January 2023, illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI, alleging these companies "violated the rights of millions of artists" by flooding the internet with imitations of their work. The lawsuit remains contested and ongoing. Creators are not only seeing their work appropriated but by some of the world's wealthiest individuals, often with overt contempt. In 2024, OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati suggested that creative jobs eliminated by AI "shouldn't have been there in the first place."
The Anti-Humanism of Tech Elites
Such attacks on art reveal the profound anti-humanism within the tech elite. This class often avoids human interaction, viewing its serendipities, annoyances, and joys as friction. Learning art involves similar friction, yet friction underpins all pleasure, whether from a pen on paper or a lover's kiss. Three years after our open letter, AI has ravaged the already fragile illustration industry. Many colleagues are unemployed, and entry-level gigs that once nurtured young artists have vanished. This pattern repeats across countless creative sectors. We are being replaced by digital homunculi trained on our stolen creations. The quality is subpar, but that hardly matters; generative AI serves to discipline and then eliminate human workers, with audiences expected to accept this as progress.
Lessons from the Luddites
Tech boosters often demonise resistance by invoking the Luddites, portraying them as primitive fools who destroyed machines they couldn't comprehend. History, however, tells a different tale. As detailed in Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine, Luddites were skilled artisans fighting for their livelihoods against "satanic mills"—textile sweatshops reliant on child labour. Barred from unionising, they smashed machines as protest. Their defeat was not due to inevitable progress but to state violence: troops were deployed, resulting in executions or deportation to Australian penal colonies.
The Stakes for Society
Artists today are fighting for a way of life, and if disorganisation leads to failure, everyone loses. AI's inappropriate scraping began with illustrators but now encompasses everything: billions in squandered funds, carbon emissions, rare minerals in chips, land for data centres, and impacts on culture, education, sanity, and imagination. In exchange for exploiting the human and natural world, tech lords offer dystopia—a future devoid of meaningful work or genuine community, where robots chatter aimlessly, leaving nothing for humanity.
