In 2022, Molly Crabapple noticed that several images uncannily resembling her distinctive illustrations of the Aleppo skyline and portraits of protesters had spread across the web.
She realized that artificial intelligence companies had hoovered up her work, along with billions of other images on the Internet, to train models that convert blocks of text into images. When she typed her name into programs such as DALL-E, DreamStudio, and Stable Diffusion, they each spat back sloppy facsimiles of her sketch of the ravaged Syrian city.
“It’s not a good knockoff,” Crabapple told Hyperallergic. “The ultimate goal is never to be as good as the art — the goal is to be good enough to get on the page, get the consumer to use it, and get rid of the worker.”
Today, AI programs have become fully integrated into the internet. They answer inquiries in search engines with summaries lifted from other websites, compose essays for students skipping homework assignments, and even converse with us about our problems as virtual therapists. Critics also say they steal reams of copyrighted art and writing, decimating artists’ livelihoods and dulling our ability to think and create on our own by removing our need to do so.
Left: Molly Crabapple with her drawings of the Aleppo skyline
Right: DALL-E producing similar images when prompted to imitate Crabapple style
Silicon Valley’s tech barons have predicted that AI will soon become inescapable in our daily lives, wiping out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and raising unemployment to 10 to 20% within the next five years.
But the advancement of machine learning may not be inevitable. And some artists are hopeful that they can still stop it.
On a recent rainy Wednesday night in the Lower East Side, Crabapple led a discussion and workshop with tech editor Edward Ongweso Jr and the Democratic Socialists of America Tech Action Working Group called “Artists Against the Slop Beast: How AI is destroying creative work and how to fight back!”
Their message was that companies hoping to make untold riches through AI software are foisting it onto a public that is not fully aware of the damage it causes via mass surveillance of users and the elimination of labor that is spiritually rewarding.
Screenshots from Molly Crabapple’s presentation “Artists Against the Slop Beast.”
Crabapple has already seen the effects of AI on her industry. Several illustrators she knows have struggled to obtain work as companies and publications seek to lower costs by using AI prompts to create images instead of paying artists or photographers. In 2023, she wrote an open letter imploring publishers, editors, and journalists to reject using generative AI programs, which more than 4,000 people have signed.
“When AI founders use billions of images to train their programs, the only way they do that is through the profound hatred of the humanities,” Crabapple said. “The contempt for labor and effort and all that stuff that makes us human, for Silicon Valley is nothing but an impediment and a friction.”
But many companies have continued to use AI to edit stories, analyze data, and draft summaries of sports events or a company’s stock market performance. Some have relied so much on the technology that they have used it to justify downsizing staff. The Trump administration, which has cozied up to Silicon Valley CEOs and resisted regulations for AI companies, has embraced using AI-generated memes to solicit support from Black voters and support Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportations.
Crabapple and Ongweso said the best way to resist the widespread adoption of these technologies is to encourage organizations that people are a part of, no matter how small, to pass rules barring the use of AI technology for any tasks, such as drafting statements, generating images on social media, or assisting with marketing campaigns.
Shame is also a powerful deterrent, Crabapple said. When a company uses an AI-generated graphic as part of its marketing campaign, she suggests a tactic as old as the internet itself: roasting them online.
“Tell them it looks uncool,” she said. “I’ve seen companies back down.”