Death of an AI Whistleblower

Thank you Suchir Balaji

Thank you so much to the dozens of monsters who have signed up since I started posting regularly on substack. As an independent artist with no degree and a giant mouth, your subscriptions help me do the work I want, unconstrained by collectors or corporations. I am truly grateful. If you like my art, you can also buy my books and prints.

Very few people in tech give a shit about artists. Suchir Balaji was one of them.

Balaji didn’t have to. He was only twenty-six, a crazy-good-looking researcher at OpenAI, set to make money hand over fist. He had every reason to treat us with the same indifference as many of his colleagues (the nicer ones, that is — a large subset of tech people view artists with seething, jealous hate). When he saw his company stealing creative work by the billions, he could have shut up, or lied, or sneered at us like Emad Mostaque and other tech CEOs have.

Instead, this August, Balaji quit his job and blew the whistle on his bosses. On his website, he wrote a detailed analysis of how OpenAI suctioned up copyrighted work, in defiance of fair use law, and used them to power their bots. “This is not a sustainable model for the internet ecosystem as a whole,” he told The New York Times. He described how generative AI would eventually ruin the livelihoods and crowd out the voices of the very people whose work it had robbed. This is a truth that most artists know, but that tech bosses have done everything to obfuscate.

As I’ve written since 2022, AI image generators have committed the biggest art heist in history. They represent the enclosure of human creativity in corporate platforms, a colonization of our imaginations in the service of making billionaires more billions.

Balaji’s revelations were bombshells, especially since OpenAI is getting sued by the publishers and creators who it stole from. Lawyers for The New York Times named him as someone with documents related to their case.

At the end of November, Balaji was found dead in his apartment. The papers are just posting about it now. Authorities say it was a suicide, but who knows, really. And even if it was, who knows what pressures his former bosses brought to bear. Capital hates a class traitor.

All I know is this. Every artist owes Suchir Balaji a debt, for confirming what we knew from the inside. I’m grateful.