I recently spoke at a journalism conference in Perugia, Italy, in conversation with my old and brilliant friend Marisa Mazria Katz (check out her new project, Center For Artistic Inquiry and Reporting). Most of our talk was about art and journalism, but I devoted the last third to AI “art” generators, and why anyone who creates for a living has an existential interest in fighting them.
I’ve made my thoughts on generative AI pretty clear. If you’re confused, check out my op-ed in the LA Times. To sum it up- the companies behind DALL-E, Midjourney and Stability AI stole millions of pieces of copyrighted work from artists and photographers, including me, to train their algorithms. These algorithms then spit out weak-sauce mashups of our art. The pieces are free or nearly so, generated faster than any human could produce, and are just good enough to replace us because, for companies, instant and free generally wins out over talented. AI corporations stole our work, and used it to make algorithms to steal our livelihoods.
These corporations try to justify their actions by flogging the same old fairy tale about the inevitability of technological “progress.” “You creators are the equivalent of horse and buggy operators fighting the car”, their pundits say.
What they forget is that nothing humans do is inevitable. There is no god who decided that fatcat tech corporations must strip us all of the work we love. No law of history decreed that Amazon had to destroy our small businesses — or that kids in the Congo had to mine rare earth so we can numb ourselves with Candy Crush. These are human decisions, driven by money, and as such they can be challenged. We can organize against them. We can fight back.
Plus, those generators still can’t draw a goddamn hand.
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P.S. I apologize for my two-month break from Substack. I’d been working lunatic schedules on a mural and doing a project for a museum on the other side of the world. I’ll be back here more often. Thank you all for sticking with me.
