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.

Seeking to fight the tech industry’s narrative, journalist Marisa Mazria Katz and I launched an open letter, with the humble demand to keep AI-generated images out of newsrooms. It attracted thousands of signatures from around the world. Other artists fought back in more powerful ways. In January 2023, three illustrators launched a lawsuit against leading image-generation companies Midjourney and Stability AI. Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz had all seen the internet flooded with knockoffs of their work. Their complaint claimed that the two companies “violated the rights of millions of artists”. (The lawsuit is contested and is still ongoing.)

Not only were we creators seeing our work taken, it was being taken by some of the richest people on the planet, with open contempt.

In 2024, OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati told an interviewer that the creative jobs destroyed by her company’s product maybe “shouldn’t have been there in the first place”.

Such attacks on art only reveal the deep anti-humanism of the tech elite. They are a class that shuns human interaction, with its serendipities, annoyances and joys. It represents friction. Learning to make art is also friction. Never mind the fact that friction is the basis of all pleasure, whether you mean the friction of a pen against a piece of paper, or the friction of a lover’s lips against your own.

It has been three years since Marisa and I launched our open letter. AI has torn through the already fragile illustration industry. Many of my colleagues are out of work. Worse, the entry-level illustration gigs where young artists once learned their trade have been annihilated. The same process is taking place in countless creative industries. We are replaced by digital homunculi, trained on our stolen creations. And no, the work is not good, but that scarcely matters. Generative AI is a tool to discipline, then eliminate, the human worker. The audience will just have to get used to it. This is sold as progress.

When tech boosters want to demonise resistance, they invoke the luddites. By their telling, the luddites were primitive idiots, who smashed machines they were too stupid to understand. History though, tells a different story. As recounted by Brian Merchant’s sublime work Blood in the Machine, luddites were skilled artisans, fighting for their way of life against the “satanic mills” – textile sweatshops powered by child semi-slaves. Forbidden from unionising, luddites smashed machines as a protest tactic. And they did not lose to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical force. The government called in troops, and the luddites were either executed or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.

Artists too are fighting for a way of life. And if we are too disorganised to triumph, that will be everyone’s loss. AI companies’ inappropriate scraping may have started with the work of illustrators like me, but it has grown to encompass everything else. It extends to the billions of dollars that these companies squander each year, to the carbon they burn, to the rare minerals in their chips, to the land on which their data centres sit, to culture, education, sanity and our very imaginations. In return for the entirety of the human and non-human world, the tech lords can only offer us dystopia. Their fantasy future contains neither meaningful work nor real communities, just robots chattering to each other, leaving nothing for us.

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