By the time generative AI had become a routine feature of online life, many of its critics were already pointing to the same underlying charge: that the technology was built on the mass extraction of human-made work. In a Guardian essay, artist Molly Crabapple argues that image generators did not simply arrive as another creative tool, but as systems trained on vast archives of artists’ labour taken from the internet without permission, payment or even acknowledgement.

Crabapple says she began seeing artificial versions of her own work in 2022, but quickly realised the problem was far wider than her own portfolio. She describes AI output as a diluted imitation of human craft, and says the scale of the training process amounted to a raid on the work of countless creators. That argument has echoed well beyond her own practice, with reporting by Smithsonian magazine noting that artists have circulated lists of names said to have appeared in training datasets, reigniting questions about copyright, consent and attribution in the age of machine learning.

The legal fight has already begun to take shape. Smithsonian magazine has reported on lawsuits brought by artists against companies including Midjourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt, with plaintiffs alleging that their images were scraped to train models that now generate competing material. Crabapple similarly points to the 2023 case brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, who said the companies had violated the rights of millions of artists, although that dispute remains unresolved.

Her wider criticism is political as much as artistic. She recalls the 2023 Perugia journalism festival, where, she says, tech advocates presented AI adoption as unavoidable and warned newsrooms they would be left behind if they resisted. Crabapple argues that this rhetoric disguises a power struggle rather than a neutral technological shift, and says the same logic has been used to normalise displacement across creative industries.

The damage, she contends, is already visible in illustration and at the entry level, where many artists traditionally learn their trade. The deeper concern is not only that AI systems imitate style, but that they help devalue human work itself, allowing companies to treat replacement as progress. For Crabapple, the dispute is no longer confined to artists: it reaches questions of labour, community, culture and the economic model behind the technology.

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Source: Noah Wire Services