60 Minutes - 02/22/2026: Left Behind, South Africa's Refugees, Is That Art?

Episode Date: February 23, 2026

Correspondent Cecilia Vega reports from McDowell County, W.Va. – once the nation’s largest coal producer, and now one of the poorest places in the country, where the food stamp program started and the opioid crisis took hold. When President Trump said he would “permanently pause migration from all third world countries” to the U.S., there was one exception: the resettlement of white South African refugees, mostly Afrikaners. The president has said white farmers in the country are victims of genocide, a claim the government of South Africa disputes. Artificial intelligence is being used to make art that is being embraced by many of the world’s most prestigious museums and auction houses, raising an age-old question: what counts as art?  To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drive 350 miles from the nation's capital to McDowell County, West Virginia, where affordability is the difference between buying groceries and heating a home. Clean drinking water is hard to come by here. A turn of the tap can look like this. This shouldn't be the case anywhere in the world, let alone in the wealthiest nation in the world. There is one group of refugees being welcomed to the United States. President Trump says white farmers from South Africa are victims of a genocide. These are burial sites right here.

Burial sites. Over a thousand of white farmers. We went to South Africa to see for ourselves. It definitely wasn't a burial site. I mean, those crosses were there for less than 48 hours. Rufi Nidal invited us inside this space, that is, L.A. studio. Every image that surrounds us, and it all created using artificial intelligence. So those are not real birds. No.

Take it in. Whoa. A hypnotic flow of shapes and colors that can make you feel like Alice in Wonderland stumbled into Studio 54. Is this a party trick? I don't think so. I feel like it's a new form of art. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Scott Pelly. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alphonse. I'm John Wertheim.

I'm Cecilia Vega. Those stories, and in our last minute, a hockey great reflects on America's goals, tonight on 60 Minutes. For some, these are the boom times. 401Ks are surging. The stock market has hit an all-time high, but drive just 350 miles from the nation's capital,

and the conversation isn't about how to get rich, but how to survive. McDowell County, West Virginia was once the nation's largest coal producer. It is now one of the poorest places in the country, where the food stamp program started, and later the opioid crisis took hold. Today, one in three households there depends on those food stamps, and now the program that has fed families for decades is facing the largest cuts in history. We went to McDowell County last month and learned that this is a lot of the state of the state. an all too familiar pattern. Government help comes and goes, promises are made and broken, and the people are left behind. McDowell County sits deep in the southern coal fields of West Virginia,

stretching more than 500 square miles across the Appalachian Mountains. There's just one traffic light and more churches than we could count. It's a place where clean drinking water is hard to come by. A turn of the tap can look like this. I think if you would ask probably nine out of ten individuals here, they would tell you that they feel very much forgotten. By who? Everybody, the government, every institution that you can think of. So tell me about the congregation.

Pastor Brad Davis grew up in the coal fields just over the county line and now leads congregations at five United Methodist churches in McDowell. He spends his days listening to those who trust God, each other, and not much else. I've heard directly people say, well, why don't people just move? And my response to that is why should we? Why should we have to move? This is home. Now we're coming into AnnaWalt.

Home sweet home. Betty Stepp has lived in the town of Anawalt for all of her 76 years. That's Jackie. Everybody honks at everybody? Long enough to remember when there was still a school, a theater and a doctor. If you run out of milk, you go to drive, how far? 45 minutes. 45 minutes.

Two mountains. That's if you can afford a car. Many here can't. Yet the only business left in town. To be on their best behavior. Tom and Donald's mechanic shop. This is Tom. How you are you?

This is Donald. The famous Donald. Donald and Tom are beloved by all the widows. In this area. A retired teacher's aide, Betty and her husband live on a fixed income. These days, everything feels expensive. If I go to the grocery store, I can't get out there less than $200. And that's a week.

Sometimes it's $300. Groceries are really high. What have you had to cut back on in these times? Beef for sure. I cut back on chicken. vegetables. She's not alone. Across the country, families are feeling the squeeze.

Food prices are almost 20% higher today than in 2022. I've heard a lot of folks from this community say, if we don't help each other, no one's going to help us. Nobody's going to come and save us. We save each other. Linda McKinney runs the county's largest food bank. You're allowed to come once a month. Entirely on donations and volunteers.

Since the government, shut down this past fall, when Americans around the country lost snap benefits or food stamps for weeks, Linda says more new faces have been coming in. Lately, we have a lot of young mothers that come, and they'll say, I never thought I'd have to come. And the children is what breaks my heart. They didn't ask to be brought into this situation, and they suffer daily. Every weekend, more than 100 children receive backpacks filled with food, so they have something to eat when they're not.

in school. The thing that we're finding, we have parents that say, well, my kid didn't get a snap bag. And then you find out the child on Friday is eating that food on the bus. They're hungry. They're so hungry, the food that's supposed to last them through the weekend, they're eating on the bus. They're eating on the bus.

It's a tale of two economies. At the White House, you'll hear about job growth and victory over inflation. We just had fantastic reports on inflation way down. But in McDowell, the median household income is about $30,000. Affordability isn't a buzzword here. It's the difference between buying groceries or paying for heat. In the 1940s, McDowell County was rich in coal jobs. These mines powered America, helping to build railroads and cities.

At its peak, nearly 100,000 people lived here, earning some of the nation's highest hourly wages. But as machines moved in, mining jobs dwindled and the local economy collapsed. In 1960, John F. Kennedy campaigned for president here. I think there are at least four or five things the government can do. The poverty he witnessed led him to launch the modern food stamp program. McDowell County residents were the first recipients. Today in McDowell, there are fewer than a thousand coal jobs left, and only 17,000 people remain. We lack so much. We lack jobs. Just in the county alone, there is not enough jobs for everyone.

26-year-old Tabitha Collins was a stay-at-home mom until her fiancé was hit by a car on the job last year and left disabled. And how often are you here? I'm here five days a week. She works at a local nonprofit, Big Creek people in action, and is the sole income earner for her family of six, along with caring for their family. their toddler, she's also helping to raise her fiancée's three younger siblings. It's up to you to raise these kids in a decent manner, you know, and try to teach them about the drug epidemic and how it can affect others, because that's a lot of what we struggle with. In a county ravaged by opioids, it's a common story. The epidemic claimed a generation of parents, leaving family members like Tabitha, raising more children on less. Even with food stamps, she often comes up short.

We still struggle food-wise. I still have to take a lot out of my payday, which therefore doesn't go towards bills. And in the wintertime, our power is very high. You live in paycheck-to-paycheck? Yes. And when you say the electrical bills were high, how high are we talking? In the month of December, my electrical bill was $480.

You got a shut off notice. We sure did. I mean, it was scary. I was trying to figure out which bill is more important, you know, and it comes down to that. That choice is about to become more difficult. Snap and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history, more than a trillion dollars over the next decade. as a result of President Trump's sweeping domestic policy bill passed last year.

It will be up to states to pick up more of the costs, and recipients will face stricter work requirements. Tens of thousands of West Virginians will likely lose benefits. We rely on the benefits very much, and it's not because we're taking advantage of the government. It's because we actually need these things. I wonder if you think that the... that's what the perception is that some people have. I do, but I don't believe that.

I mean, a lot of us are working citizens, and we're still barely making it by. Outsiders are often quick to assume this is Trump country, but politics here defy easy labels. For decades, McDowell voted blue, backing Barack Obama in 2008, and Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary. In the last three elections, President Trump won the county, which had the lowest voter participation in the state.

I think we as a community collectively are so desperate to see some sort of change that when someone comes along and says, I'm going to make coal great again. We desperately cling to that with a death grip. And I think that goes a long way in explaining why the political climate here has shifted the way it has. Earlier this month, coal executives and miners handed President Trump a trophy, declaring him the, quote, undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal, after his latest executive order aimed at boosting the coal industry. In McDowell, whether from the White House or the State House, They've heard it all before.

What are the promises that have been made and not kept? Economic resurgence, renaissance of the coal industry, the elimination of poverty, fixing our water systems. Big promises. Big promises. And nothing ever changes. Nowhere is the failure of government more clear than in the county's water supply, which at times is not clear at all. Few trust that it's safe enough to drink, and angry residents have documented the black and brown that oozes from aging pipes and contamination left behind from the coal industry. West Virginia's governor recently set aside $8.3 million in federal funds to upgrade sewage and water lines in McDowell,

a drop in the bucket compared to what county and state officials say is still needed. This is tap water. When Pastor Brad isn't in church, he's often pleading with politicians to do more. You see this as a public health crisis? Absolutely. There are people in parts of this county who haven't taken a hot shower in six years or longer because the fumes from the water makes them physically ill. Reports of skin rashes and burns are not uncommon.

Many families spend upwards of $150 a month for bottled water on top of their water. bills. It's a luxury not everyone can afford. So they fill up here at this old mine shaft shooting water from the side of a mountain. I think it's going to be hard for a lot of folks to get their mind around that you've got American citizens getting a ride to a spring on the side of the road to bring a jug to fill up because that's their only access to water. And it should be hard for people to wrap their minds around because this shouldn't be the case. This shouldn't be the case. This shouldn't be the case anywhere in the world, let alone in the wealthiest nation in the world. To ease the burden, Betty Steff and other retirees, the youngest of whom is 70, go door-to-door

delivering heavy cases of water to neighbors. I think our government needs to hear us. We've worked our whole life here. Why won't they help us? Does it matter who's in charge? It doesn't matter if it's Republicans or Democrats. It doesn't matter. In McDowell County, people face two choices, stay and scrape by or scrape together enough money to leave. Tabitha Collins is staying. You're 26 years old and you're raising four kids. That's a lot of responsibility. It's a lot. I don't know how I get through it, but I do. I just want to live the dream like anyone else does, you know, have a family, have a home, and not stress about the hardships that we have around here.

Perishers have told you that they feel like they're tired of living in what feels like a third world country? That's a direct quote. What do you say to someone who says that to you? Amen. Amen, because I'm tired of it, too. It's gone on long enough. The Hyundai Allentra hybrid inspires a special type of love,

the type that makes you slow down and enjoy the ride. With best-in-class fuel efficiency and a best-in-class new car warranty, it's made for the long run, wherever the road takes you next. Because some relationships are built to go the distance. It's that Hyundai Alantra type of love. In November, President Trump announced he would, quote, permanently pause migration from all third world countries to the U.S. after a member of the National Guard was killed and another badly wounded in Washington, allegedly by an Afghan refugee.

But there is one group of refugees that Trump administration is welcoming. It's expediting the resettlement of white South Africans, mostly Afrikaners who are descendants of Dutch settlers. President Trump says that white farmers are victims of a genocide. The South African government disputes that. We went to South Africa to see for ourselves. In the rolling hills of Kualu Natal province in the southeast of South Africa, we met Daryl Brown, a seventh generation rancher and farmer. Did you grow up knowing you would be a farmer? It was always in my blood. It's a calling. But that calling has often come with risks. Ten years ago, his 82-year-old father was brutally

attacked on the farm by robbers looking for guns and money. Then in 2020, Brown's friends, Glenn and Vita Rafferty, were murdered in a robbery on their farm nearby. Your father was attacked. You've had friends murdered. Do you live in fear? I certainly live carefully. We're aware of what's happening around us. We don't take silly chances. We came to Daryl Brown's farm because of what President Trump said last May about the murders of South African farmers. It's a genocide that's taking place that you people don't want to write. about, but it's a terrible thing that's taking place, and farmers are being killed. They happen to be white.

Nine days later, South Africa's president, Cyril Ramaphosa, came to the White House. Elon Musk, who was born in South Africa, and has also made claims of genocide, was there, too. What happened next seemed to take Ramaphosa by surprise. Excuse me, turn the lights down. President Trump showed several videos, proof, the White House. said of the violence targeting white farmers. These are burial sites right here. Burial sites.

Over a thousand of white farmers. We found the spot where those white crosses were once planted. It's a lonely pothole road not far from Daryl Brown's ranch. It definitely wasn't a burial site. I mean, those crosses were there for less than 48 hours. It was purely an avenue of crosses that we planted there in honor of commercial farmers in South Africa that had lost their lives. Brown knows about the crosses because he put them there on the day of his friends, Glenn and Vita Rafferty's funeral. He keeps them locked in a shed.

In 2024, he brought them out again for the funeral of his best friend, Tolly Nell, who was also murdered on his farm. Tolly's wife, Renee, still lives there. Her husband was killed in front of her trying to fight off burglars. Her son, Tienis, was tied up while they stole cash and guns. No one has been arrested. My life has changed. I've got nothing to look forward to. Sorry.

Tienis now runs the farm. He carries a weapon with him almost all the time. The only time I don't have it on me is when I'm in the house. shower. Really? Because I don't ever want another situation to arise where I feel that I'm a victim. The Nells have hired private security guards and fortified their property with electric fences and cameras. Many in South Africa feel they can't rely on the country's ineffective and overwhelmed police to keep them safe. When you heard President Trump talk about a genocide, what did you think? Well, I just thought he was using the wrong word.

In your opinion, it's not a genocide here. Not what I know as a genocide, not what I've heard of what a genocide is. I see our attack as an opportunistic attack. They knew there was money. They knew there were firearms. Whites make up only about 7% of the population of South Africa, but still own 72% of all privately held agricultural land

and many of the country's large commercial farms. But according to Wendili Salon, A leading agricultural economist, the overwhelming number of farmers and those working on farms are black. The white farmers may have a bigger part of the proportion of income, but the vast majority of people operating the farms in South Africa are black. There is crime on farms, and there are murders on farms. They affect black farmers as well as white farmers. They affect black farmers as well as white farmers and also farm workers who are largely black.

Nekla Luzuma farmed this nine-acre plot for 20 years. He was used to having equipment stolen, but in 2024, a group of men shot at him and broke into his house. Did you think at the time they were going to kill you? 100%. After the attack, he decided to sell the farm. There are a lot of black farmers that are attacked, and the voices are not out.

People don't pay attention. Just another number, not a statistic. South Africa is one of the most dangerous countries in the world. The murder rate is seven times that of the United States, and the majority of victims and perpetrators are black. According to police, more than 25,000 people were murdered here in 2024. It's estimated, 37 of them were killed on farms. 37 out of 25,000.

For us, it's farmers, that 37 is too much. Johann Kozza is an Afrikaner who's head of South Africa's largest agricultural organization. It's actually not about white genocide. It's about criminality in South Africa. That's what's happening on farms. It's what's happening in streets in Johannesburg and other major cities.

It's crime. It's crime. The fact that it happened on a farm doesn't make me special as a farmer. It's horrendous. Any murder is horrendous. South African police only began publishing the race of those murdered on farm.

under pressure last year. In the first quarter of 2025, they reported six farm homicides. Five of the victims were black. Poverty is the biggest driver of crime in South Africa. And how do you solve that? South Africa remains one of the world's most economically unequal countries.

44% of blacks here live in poverty compared to 1% of whites. Kotsa went to Washington last February to talk with administration officials about the economic problems here. He was surprised by what they focused on. They asked us about the white genocide. And the first thing I said is,

Alma's Afrikaans is what you could get. I grew up Afrikaans, and I never witnessed that. South Africa's 2.7 million Afrikaners descend from Dutch settlers who arrived on the continent 400 years ago. Every year, they celebrate their culture and language in the shadow of the Vortrecker monument, which was built as a simple,

of Afrikaner nationalism. Millions of Black South Africans were forcibly evicted from their land and lost their rights to it by law in 1913. When Afrikaners took power in 1948, they instituted apartheid, a brutal system of racial segregation and discrimination. Blacks had virtually no rights, and laws restricted where they could live and work.

That all changed in 1994, when Black South Africans were allowed to vote, and elected Nelson Mandela. In the decades since, there has been progress, a growing black middle class and a reduction in poverty. But some controversial government efforts to redress inequalities have been plagued by graft and cronyism. We're here today to talk about South Africa.

White supremacists in the U.S. and elsewhere have long portrayed Afrikaners as victims of discrimination and worse genocide. But those claims didn't go mainstream until 2018. When then Fox News host Tucker Carlson began alleging Afrikan or farmers were being killed and having their land seized. An embattled minority of farmers, mostly Afrikaans speaking, is being targeted in a wave of barbaric and horrifying murders. President Trump then tagged Tucker Carlson in a tweet, saying there were large-scale killings of farmers in South Africa and the government was now seizing. land from white farmers.

Are there large-scale killings of farmers? They're not. They're not. It is not happening. Donald Trump was fed this information. This link farm murders, genocide. There is no such a thing. Max Dupree is a prominent Afrikaans journalist and former newspaper editor.

Are you the victim of unjust discrimination? I've never been discriminated against. And I'm a loud, mild citizen, because I'm a journalist. So I express myself very strongly, also against this inept corrupt government. Discrimination is outlawed under South Africa's constitution, which also protects property rights and due process. But in January last year, the South African Parliament approved a land expropriation act, which critics say violates that constitution. The government compares the expropriation act to eminent domain in the United States, which allows it to buy price.

private land for public use. What's different is that South Africa's expropriation act could, in some cases, allow the government to take land without compensation, and not just for public use, but to redress past discriminatory laws. Landowners have the right to fight back in court, but that might take years. The expropriation act isn't in effect yet, and it's being challenged in court by South Africa's second largest political party and by Kali Kriel, the CEO of the Africana Rights Group Afri Forum, who has repeatedly traveled with others to Washington to lobby for support.

There is a serious threat to property rights. There is a serious threat to the lives of farmers, and that needs to be recognized. Are white farmers being killed for their land? Yes, I believe so. Is there a white genocide going on in South Africa? We've never used the term white genocide. We're saying they are tortures,

people are being murdered. We are seeing a call for genocide. The call for genocide, Creel is talking about, is this song. Kill the Boer, the Farmer. Killed the Boer, Kill the Farmer, which President Trump played a video of in the Oval Office in May. In the 1980s and 90s, it was sung at protests against apartheid and is still used at rallies by the man singing,

Julius Malema, a race-baiting opposition politician who wants the government to seize white-owned land. You know, what the rhetoric is, is that we hear the same people that Chant Killed the word, kill the farmer, use the narratives to try and portray Afrikaners and farmers as thieves. Has any farmer had their land taken in the last 30 years of black rule here in this country, without compensation or without having redress through courts? Because the legislation did not allow it. The new legislation allows it. President Trump cited the expropriation act in his executive order last February,

cutting off all aid to South Africa and allowing for the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination. The first group of 59 Afrikaner refugees arrived in May, now almost 2,000 or here. Did you ever imagine that virtually the only group of refugees is going to be allowed in the U.S. would be white Afrikaners. That shows up the complete absurdity of this Afrikaner refugee thing. Because they're saying these white Afrikaner refugees, their lives are more important than the bona fide refugees from everywhere else in the world that wants to come there.

They're saying white lives are worth more than other lives. Remember Daryl Brown, the former who organized the protests with the white crosses? He says he won't be paid. packing his bags to become a refugee in America anytime soon. I'm an African. I've been burnt by the African sun, and I'm not going anywhere. There's a lot of sun in Florida. I'm very positive about South Africa. This is my home. Think about the way art is created. You might imagine painters, photographers, or sculptors

immersed in their work at their studios. But what about a person sitting in front of a computer screen using artificial intelligence and data to create visuals, is that art? It's a question that is being asked and answered by some of the most prestigious museums, critics, and auction houses in the world. Some artists call AI a revolutionary new medium. Others call it theft. We wanted to see it for ourselves, so we went to Los Angeles to meet Rafiq Anadol. The 40-year-old Turkish-American artist is considered a pioneer.

in the world of AI art. If you're wondering what that world looks like, grab your dramemean. This is... Whoa. Rafiq Anadol invited us inside this space at his L.A. studio. Every image that surrounds us,

Anadol created using artificial intelligence. So those are not real birds. Nope. We'll get to exactly how he created it in a moment. But first, take it in. Whoa. A hypnotic flow of shit. shapes and colors that morph and evolve in the mirrors and LED screens that surround us.

It can make you feel like Alice in Wonderland stumbled into Studio 54. I will say this, you should not have a cocktail before standing here. All of this, while a device around your neck pumps out different AI-generated scents, such as rain and flowers, to accompany what you're seeing. And it all says eventually another device will monitor viewers' visors. statistical statistics such as heartbeat, and that data will be used to change the art in real time. Is this a party trick? I don't think so.

I feel like it's a new form of art. Like we are discovering a new place that's never been before. If that all sounds a bit out there, consider the planetary scale of Rafiq Anadol's work. His massive mind-bending images have been stretched across the sphere in Las Vegas, the facade of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and Antonio Gadi's Casa Batio in Barcelona. When people ask you what you do, what do you say? So I'm a media artist and I'm using data and AI in my work.

So in more than 16 years, I paint with a thinking brush. What's a thinking brush? I believe that information around us, a data around us, has its own voice. But like painting, drawing, the things we traditionally think of, sculpting, do you do any of those things? I think in my mind's eye, so technically I may not draw well, but in my mind's eye I can compute, I can imagine geometrically what exactly the mind's eye is looking for. To create art, Anadol uses data, lots of it.

For this piece, he used 200 million photos of Earth. Data from NASA was the driving portion. was the driving force behind these exhibits? When I think about data as a pigment, I think it doesn't need to dry. It can move in any shape, in any form, any color, and texture. It sounds a little trippy. It's trippy because I think, as artists,

we ask what is beyond reality. We can connect this one to another one. To show us how he does that, and it all grabbed a gaming controller. So we are in this new algorithm, that I am literally controlling the whole system. Anadol says his team curated 153 million images for a piece on California landscapes. We are flying in our data set of nature.

Okay. So in this archive, we have flora, fauna. Each image is converted into a series of data points that represents its characteristics, such as color, texture, and shape. They're then plotted into into multi-dimensional space. That data is what the AI learns from. So when it receives a prompt, it can create its own new version. Images, Anadol says, only, quote,

exist in the mind of a machine. This isn't a real place. This is not. This is AI dreaming this world, and now we are reshaping this world together. Anadol then applies special algorithms to blend and make the images into his signature fluid style.

Are you a close? computer programmer or are you an artist? I am an artist, but I love computers. But now with AI, I feel like I have now programmed it in a way that I never imagined before. How much of this is driven by you and how much by the machine? So this is a great question, because I try my very best

last 10 years to make a 50% machine, 50% human. Treating AI as a co-creator has made Rafiq Anadol a darling of the tech world. He's teamed up with Google, MIT and Microsoft to create large public installations. Let's start the wedding here. He's been embraced by some in the art world. Sold at $1 million. Selling his pieces for upwards of a million dollars at auction.

His work has been exhibited at museums around the world. And in 2022, the Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned this piece. A colossal 24-foot-high installation. that filled the MoMA lobby called Unsupervised. How did the public react to unsupervised when they came in and saw it? It was a utter extraordinary hit. People sat in front of it for hours, literally transfixed by what they were seeing. It's an amazing painting.

Glenn Lowry was the director of the MoMA for three decades. He retired in September. To create Unsurricular, Supervised, Lowry told us, Rafiq Anadol trained an AI system on the publicly available metadata of the entire MoMA collection. Think of metadata as the digital DNA of each piece. It describes and identifies the art. Anadol used MoMA's metadata to reimagine 200 years of art. He wrote some algorithms that allowed the data from one object to evolve into the data of another object to become yet a third object or a fourth object never before seen.

And I think people found it deeply satisfying. It's one of the most popular images in the collection. Studies have found that typically museum visitors spend about 28 seconds looking at great works of art. For unsupervised, Anadol says it was 38 minutes. But not everyone was quite so enamored. It's like a giant lava lamp. that you can't take your eyes off of...

Jerry Salts is the Pulitzer Prize winning art critic for New York Magazine. It's like an etch a sketch. He called on supervised a half-million-dollar screen saver. When people came in and they looked at this, they looked at it for 38 minutes. Isn't that the sign of success? Popularity is not the sign of success. how long you spend with the work of art is not a sign of success so much as your willingness to get quiet within yourself. Go to uncomfortable places, become comfortable in those places, asking yourself questions.

In front of a Rafiq adenol, you sit down, go into a stupor, and you don't have to think much, you go, oh, there goes a painting that looks a little like Renoir, morphing into one that looks like Picasso, morphing into an amoeba. It's something to look at. Is it art? AI is art. AI will be art. But Salt says AI has a long way to go.

AI is one day old. And we're already having conversations. I hate it. You love it. It's good. It's bad. It's new. It's young.

Most of what you see in AI, Sharon, is crap. Crap. 90% crap. But 90% of the art made during the Renaissance was also crap. Things take time. I think one has to recognize that works of art that challenge you are always going to be misunderstood by many at first.

Momos Glenn Lowry says the skepticism around AI mirrors the reaction to the advent of photography 200 years ago. When suddenly the human hand is removed from the making of an image, what does that mean? And I think artificial intelligence is analogous to that. But I don't think you can stop technology. Molly Crabapple is a New York-based artist and author. She does not think AI should be welcomed into the art world. You've called this the greatest art heist in history. Yes.

Why? Well, when we talk about art heist, typically, we're talking about one painting being taken from a museum to three. They stole billions and billions of images. Crab Apple says museums, galleries, and auction houses shouldn't buy or display AI art trained on other artists work without their consent. She calls the popular AI art generators like this, which let users type in a prompt to create striking, sometimes surreal images, corporate plagiarism bots. She says they're trained on art scraped from the web, including hers. This is an illustration crabapple did of Aleppo, Syria. When we asked an AI image generator

to create a drawing of a Syrian skyline in the style of Molly Crabapple, it made this in seconds, strikingly similar. Did anyone ever ask you, hey, can we feed your images into this system? Certainly not. No artist has been asked for their consent. No artist has received compensation. In fact, we don't even see credit. The AI companies have told lawmakers that what they're doing falls under fair use, a legal doctrine which allows copyrighted works to be used without permission under certain circumstances. They claim AI is studying and learning, just like a human would. But a group of artists has filed a class action lawsuit against four of the AI companies

that make art generators, accusing them of copyright infringement, among other things. There are some artists that have called using these images theft. What do you say to that? I completely agree all my artist's friends. I know what they mean, and as an artist, I only use my own data. Rubeke Anadol told us since 2020, he's only worked with what he calls ethically source data sets. What do you mean by that? So this is the most important part of art making with AI.

It takes a lot of teamwork, a lot of thinking, research. We always start with permission. Then we know exactly where information comes from. that information comes from. How long has this been in the works? Now, Anadol is building a 20,000 square foot museum dedicated to AI arts in downtown Los Angeles called Dataland. How big will the screens be in here?

A massive canvas to celebrate his optimism about technology. Anadol insists AI is not a threat, but a tool to create art. No human could create alone. There are some people that say AI can never truly create art because it lacks emotion, it lacks lived experience, and it lacks intent. Yes. These are all, I think, true. That's why I believe human-machine collaboration.

We are really completing that bridge where I feel like, most likely, where we are going as humanity, and just be sure that it's done right, and it's shared right, and celebrate this new age of imagination. Get immersed in Anadol's AI work. and decide for yourself. Is it Art? At 60 Minutes Overtime.com. Mike Arruzioni delivered one of the greatest upsets in American sports history. As captain of the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team,

Arugioni led a squad of amateurs against the mighty Soviet Union and scored the game-winning goal. We asked him to reflect on the lesson of that miracle on ice 46 years ago today. I think the lesson that our team showed in 1980 by winning an Olympic gold medal, by beating the Soviets, a team that nobody in the world thought we could beat, is a great example of what makes our country so great. Herb Brooks, our coach, called us a lunch pail, hard hat group of guys,

a guys who came to work every single day, rolled up our sleeves, striving to be the best that we could be. And I think when you look back on 250 years in our country, you've seen moments like that where, despite the challenges, despite the fact that nobody thinks we can achieve something, you find a way to do it. In 1980, we were looking for something to feel good about, and it happened to be us.

It happened to be our team, and people related to that. People come up to me to this day, and they'll say, I remember where I was when we won. And I always go, We, I didn't know you were on the team. But that's what that moment meant. If you believe in something and you're willing to work for it, you can't accomplish it, and our team exemplified that. I'm Cecilia Vega.

We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes. I want to know what's going on in the world. You can't do that if you're just sitting in a chair, reading about what other people have found. You have to get out there and listen. By telling people about each other, you actually bring this country together. There are big questions that all of us are asking.

I want to get you the answers. I'm Tony DeCopold. Join me on the CBS Evening News.