An artist has accused generative AI companies of committing the greatest art heist in history, as billions of images are harvested from the internet without credit, compensation, or consent. The artist, writing in a first-person account, said they first noticed strange facsimiles of their work in 2022, after AI image generators scraped their entire portfolio online. The copies looked like the work of a 'none-too-talented teenager on tranquilisers', reduced to rote lines and blotches.
Tech leaders were aware of the implications, the artist said. In 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claimed that enforcing copyright law would 'kill' the AI industry, and companies would continue to 'move fast and break things' – breaking creators in the process. At the 2023 Perugia journalism festival, tech industry advocates told newsrooms to adopt AI or be left behind, while privately admitting that AI would eliminate writers.
In response, the artist and journalist Marisa Mazria Katz launched an open letter demanding that AI-generated images be kept out of newsrooms, attracting thousands of signatures worldwide. That same month, three illustrators – Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz – filed a lawsuit against Midjourney and Stability AI, alleging that the companies violated the rights of millions of artists. The case remains contested and ongoing.
The contempt for creative workers was further exposed in 2024, when OpenAI's chief technology officer, Mira Murati, suggested that creative jobs destroyed by AI 'shouldn't have been there in the first place'. The artist described such attitudes as deeply anti-humanist, arguing that friction – whether from pen on paper or the effort of learning a craft – is essential to human pleasure.
Three years on, the impact has been devastating. Many of the artist's colleagues in the illustration industry are out of work, and entry-level roles that once trained young artists have been annihilated. The same process is now sweeping through countless creative industries, as workers are replaced by 'digital homunculi' trained on stolen creations.
