Tech Won't Save Us - Why AI is a Threat to Artists w/ Molly Crabapple

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Molly Crabapple to discuss why AI image generation tools are a threat to illustrators and why we need to refuse the idea that Silicon Valley’s visions of technology are inevitable. Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hisham. Follow Molly on Twitter at @mollycrabapple.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham and part of the Harbinger Media Network.Also mentioned in this episode:Molly wrote an op-ed for the LA Times about the threat of AI-generated tools for artists, and co-wrote an open letter about restricting AI illustration for the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting.Karla Ortiz wrote about how teaching an AI to copy an artist’s style isn’t democratization; it’s theft.Corridor Digital claimed they were “democratizing” animation by using AI trained on Vampire Hunter D to generate their own animated video.Rest of World reported on how AI was being used to take video game illustrators’ jobs in China.AI is already being used to justify laying off journalists.In February, Creative Commons published an article arguing that using copyrighted works to train generative AI should be considered fair use.Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were hit with a copyright lawsuit, and Getty Images launched its own suit against Stable Diffusion.The US Copyright Office says AI generated images are not eligible for copyright protection.Support the show

It's just so perverse. I truly don't understand why anyone would decide to burn tons and tons and tons and tons of carbon for the sole purpose of stealing a job that people love to do. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Molly Crabapple. Molly is an artist and writer based in New York. She's the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hasham. I've been following Molly's work for a long time. She's an artist who has illustrated so many important events over the past decade or so, you know, political events that have happened over that period of time. And I feel like if you're on the left, her art has just become unescapable. But of course, in the past six months to a year, as generative AI has been growing in this conversation, as we've seen the impacts of tools like ChatGBT, but most importantly for this conversation of image generation tools like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and DALI, a lot of artists and illustrators have become concerned about what this might mean for their profession, not so much because these tools are great at replicating their works, at making things that are better than them

and at being a better artist, but because it can be very cheap for corporations and for companies to generate images that are kind of passable very quickly and then maybe pay an artist to kind of fix it up later. It presents a real threat to the livelihoods of illustrators like Molly, and especially many of the people who are just trying to get started in this industry, who are trying to find their style, who are trying to get their kind of first jobs.

And this could really wipe that out for them. A lot of the focus of the generative AI hype has been around the chatbots and chatGBT, but this image aspect of it is also incredibly important as we think about, you know, what these AI tools are going to mean for different professions in society. And of course, we've had a previous episode with Aaron Beninoff, where we talked about why I'm a bit skeptical, and he was a bit skeptical that it's going to have kind of, you know, the society changing ramifications that is often promised of these various tech tools, right? But I think that if there is a profession that could really get hit

hard by these tools, again, not because they're better, but because they're quicker and cheaper. And so, you know, that can be good enough. It is artists and probably writers as well who might feel the impact of that. And we're already sort of seeing those things as we discuss in this conversation. So Molly has been writing about this for a little while, providing her perspective on what these tools might mean for artists and illustrators like herself and many others, and has also co-written an open letter discussing why artists need to be concerned about this. So I thought that she would be the perfect guest to come on to talk to us about the potential impact of these generative AI image tools, the importance of art as something that is done by humans, and how we might think about how we push back on these things.

This is such a fantastic conversation, and I think it fits in so well with a series of episodes that we've been doing over the past number of months as we've been trying to understand and kind of grapple with the implications of this new kind of tech hype cycle that we're in the middle of. So I think that you are really going to enjoy it. And if you do, of course, make sure to leave a five-star review

on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would enjoy it. And of course, if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, so I can keep having these in-depth and critical conversations with people like Molly,

you can join supporters like John, Jeff from Canada, and Ray from the UK, but who's currently living in Belgium, by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much. Enjoy this week's conversation. Molly, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to chat with you. I have been following your work for quite a while now.

Your fantastic illustrations and the art that you make has illustrated so many kind of political moments that we've all kind of been following for the past number of years. So it's great to have you on the show and to be able to discuss this really important topic with you. Oh my God, no, I'm such a fangirl of the show as well. And I love that there's one place, one place in the world that's challenging

this sort of manifest destiny of Silicon Valley and doing it so well and so brutally and so precisely. I adore it. Well, thank you very much. I'll always accept a compliment, especially from someone like you. Now to get into it, obviously, as I talked about, you are an illustrator, you're an artist, you know, you put together a lot of work that I think people, even if they might not know it's from you, will probably have seen before, right? And I wanted to start because we're talking about AI image generation and things like that. I think it's important to also understand what it goes into actually making this work that these image generators are getting trained on basically. So what is it like to do the work

that you do as an artist or an illustrator? And how did you kind of get into that profession? Well, I've been drawing since I was four years old. My mom is an illustrator. My great uncle was an artist. My great grandfather was an artist who made his living, you know, painting those like cupids and grapes on the walls of old school mansions in New York City while also having a fine art career. I come from an artist family. It's what I would do if I was on a desert island. It's like who I am. In terms of how I got my start as a professional artist, it's kind of funny. I always knew that I was not fit for regular employment. And so for me, like from the time I was like 16 or 17, I was always using art to make money, whether it was like drawing people's D&D characters or hanging

flyers in the bodega, right, to draw their pets. I always had a sketchbook with me and any little tiny crack that I could put my art into, I did since basically my teenage years. I got my big break as a professional artist by drawing for one of the most notorious nightclubs in New York City, the place where the bankers who destroyed the world's economy would like blow through $10,000 a night on champagne while watching my friends do like nude circus tricks on stage. I was like their house to lose the trip, right? I very much came of age like in the New York burlesque scene, documenting that. And then when Occupy Wall Street happened down the street from where I lived, I turned my apartment into a press room.

And just by being around journalists, I started thinking, like, maybe I could use my art that way, too. Maybe I could use my art kind of like how a photojournalist uses their camera to document history as it happens, right? And that is probably the thing that I'm most known for. I have taken my sketch pad all over the world. I was just in Palestine last week. I was in Ukraine last summer during the Russian invasion, taking it to Gaza, to Guantanamo Bay, to Puerto Rico, where my dad is from, right in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. And wherever things are happening, I like to be there drawing to document it. Thank you so much for sharing part of that story with us. I really appreciate it. And it's great to hear how you kind of got into this. It's no surprise, of course,

that you've been drawing since you were a kid, but I feel like you also have this really kind of distinctive style, right? When I see like a Molly Crabb app at work, I'm like, yeah, I know that's yours very clearly. I don't even need to double check. It's like, that's Molly's. Thank you. I mean, I think that our style, right? It's like, I'm going to sound all mystical to your audience here, but it's like our soul. It's intrinsic to us. Like our handwriting, It comes just as much from our flaws and failures and fuck ups as it does from what's good about us. And, you know, when you're someone like me, like when you're an artist who does it for a living, I mean, I must draw like six or seven hours a day. I always have. And when you do something that much, it just becomes such a part of you that you develop a voice that's yours.

Absolutely. And I think what you're describing is like part of you that you develop a voice that's yours. Absolutely. And I think what you're describing is a part of a conversation that we're sort of collectively having in this moment as we see these technologies emerge. And we're saying, like, what is the role of art, right? And what actually goes into it? And I feel like on one hand, you have these tech people who are just saying, you know, art can be something that is generated by our computers and our algorithms that we've made up. And then on the other side, I feel like there's people like us who are saying like, art is something that is kind of like intimately and

intrinsically human, right? It really comes from us as people. And the idea that we would hand that over to machines to start doing just feels kind of wrong in a way. Well, it's ridiculous. There's a very viral tweet that said that the promise of the future was that the boring jobs were going to be automated so that we could make art and do poetry all day. But instead, what's happening is that art and poetry are getting automated so we can do boring jobs all day, probably while an algorithm screams at us to to move faster. It's just so perverse. I truly don't understand why anyone would decide to burn tons and tons and tons and tons of carbon for the sole purpose of stealing a job that people love to do. Absolutely. And that we love to enjoy, right? That we love to see the product of. Why would we

want to have that be something that's kind of automated away or taken away from humans that we can relate to, that we can kind of see their experiences and their struggles reflected in the work that we're doing. Instead, now we're just seeing kind of like copies of it and combinations of it generated by a machine that doesn't have the same kind of soul as something that you put together. Yeah, like literally like a tech human centipede. Absolutely. Now, earlier this year,

you put together an open letter with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting. As we kind of saw these AI image generators getting so much attention, you know, we're kind of in this moment of AI hype where this is the next big thing that Silicon Valley is pushing. You know, AI image generation is part of it. You know, they have their chat GBTs

and their text generators and all these sorts of things as well. What motivated you to kind of respond with a letter like that in this moment? I think I was pretty similar to most art illustrators in how I came to realize what was going on with these generators. When the first iteration of Dolly came out,

we were all like, this is nightmare horror. What is this? What nonsense? But then pretty soon as the next iterations of like stable diffusion of mid journey of Dolly started coming out, they started to be like, I don't want to say good. That's not the right word, but good enough, good enough to fill a box that a human would have been paid to draw something for. And everyone I knew in the illustration community started to get very worried and also very angry when we learned that all of these image generators were only good because they were all trained on our images. But what inspired me to organize about it? Well, the tipping moment, as it were, was that me and my friend Marissa Katz,

who I did the letter with, were at the Perugia Journalism Festival in Italy, which is this big, fancy, muckety-muck journalism festival that all the muckety-mucks are at. And at this festival, there were not just one or two, but many literal paid shills of tech companies that were there to give these sold out panels about how these generative things were the future and how the newsrooms had to adopt them or else you're going to get left behind and you don't want to get left behind because that's the worst thing in the world. You got to adopt them for some reason. One particularly horrifying example to me was a professor actually stood before a room full of, I want to say maybe like 200 people in media and taught them how to use Dali to illustrate their stuff and avoid paying illustrators. And I would even

overhear conversations where one of these people would say something like, writers write too much. That ought to be automated. You know, journalists shouldn't be writing. We should just automate that away. I was so revolted and not just revolted by all of the shilling that these shills were doing, but I was revolted at the idea that we just had to accept this, that this was inevitable, that, you know, this is a genie that you can't put back in the bottle, you know, that if you try to fight this, that you're like a horse and buggy maker. And I was like, this is so ridiculous. This is so untrue. Nothing that humans do is inevitable in this world. Nothing that companies do is inevitable. We don't have to use companies' products. Corporations can be constrained by politics, by power, and by protest.

And me and Marissa, we had a panel that we had sold to Perugia where I was going to spend it all just talking about my own work. And I was like, I don't want to just talk about my artwork. I want to talk about this. I want to talk about this giant elephant in the room here because no one that I saw was actually directly challenging this false narrative of inevitability. And so I gave a speech and I showed how Dali was trained on my work. Literally, if you go into Dlly and you put a scene from Syria drawn by Molly Crabapple, you will get kind of stupid knockoffs of my work, but clear knockoffs, like clear ripoffs that someone who wasn't paying that much attention might even think was my work.

And you can be prompted by my name, right? I showed that. I showed the images of mine that were in the Lyon 5B data set, which was used to train stable diffusion. And I spoke about the intense, just disgustingness and immorality of these billion dollar corporations in Silicon Valley claiming the divine right to steal the work of working class artists, the work that we like spent our whole lives learning how to do, and just use it as fodder so that their machines can shit out bad replicas of what we do. Absolutely. You know, what you're describing shows just how pernicious this narrative from Silicon Valley is that these technologies are always inevitable, right? They put out this

thing and all of a sudden we need to accept it and we need to kind of rearrange the world around it. You know, just kind of what, like six months into this hype cycle, all of a sudden, you know, you go to a journalism festival and they have panels on how this is naturally the future. And you need to be learning to use these image generation tools. Like this is so often how it works. And we really need to back up as you're saying, and as you did at this festival to say, hold on, like, this doesn't make any sense that we just constantly accept the future sold to us by the tech industry instead of challenging that and ask who benefits and who doesn't. You know, before we got into this conversation, you were telling me about

the difference between kind of the artists who are going to get hit by this and the people who will be just fine. Can you talk to us a bit about that? Sure, I will. This is something that I think it's really important to understand. And it's a real class distinction in terms of what we mean when we say artist. Sometimes when we say the word artist, what we mean are artists who are fine artists, who are selling work in galleries, sometimes who are selling work for like a million bucks, right? Who have worked the Tangian museums And the business model of the fine art world, and this is not a slight to fine artists, and I also sell my work in galleries and have my work in museums, but this is the business model, is that you want to sell a single thing for a fuck

ton of money, for like so much money. You want to sell this like crumbled up tinfoil for $100 billion to a Russian oligarch if you can. That's how it works. I mean, sometimes you sell a beautiful sculpture for $2,000, but the essential thing is as much money as you can for one object, right? That's why it's so good for money laundering. But the other thing that we sometimes mean when we talk about artists is we mean illustrators. We mean the people that are doing the pictures that are on the comic books that are in advertisements that are in magazines, book covers, all of that. And that segment of artists has always been looked down on by fine artists because essentially illustrators are like the blue collar labor of the art world, right? We're always seen as like, not like the real intellectual artists because we didn't go to

Yale and get an MFA. And because, you know,FA and because we do a skilled trade for not that much money. And that's where I came out of. Even if I increasingly do fine art stuff, my heart is with illustrators. It's what I'm from. I told you how I got started drawing people's D&D characters. That's my world and those are my friends. And illustrators are going to be destroyed by this. They're just going to be destroyed because the business model of illustration is that you do an image, right?

And that image, you know, fills a box somewhere and a generator can work faster and cheaper than any human anywhere in the world, no matter how good they are, no matter how cheap the country they live in can do, right? No human can have the economic efficiency of a generator. The generator might do stuff that looks really bad, that has like weird warts and bunions and eight fingers. And a human might need to be involved to Photoshop out those warts and bunions. But at the end of the day, no human can work as fast and as cheap as a generator. So if you're a company that is concerned with maximizing your profits by limiting the costs of labor, which most companies are, you're going to go with a generator, right? But then it has the other advantage, which is that it serves as a disciplining

tool for labor. Because let's say you have someone like me, like you're hiring me to do a, let's say your book cover. Like I come in, I have a vision. I have certain things I will and won't draw. I work in a particular way. I take a certain amount of time to do things. All my stuff, they're paintings. They're not like done in Photoshop. So it's not so easy for me to change a color. There's all these constraints. I might flounce off and decide I don't want to do the book cover at the end of the day and be like an arrogant little artist, all these annoying things about me. Right. Whereas if you put in your prompt into a generator and you keep hitting the button until you get something that's passable, except that it has too many thumbs and like a weird eye, you can just like hire someone.

You can hire anyone to make the eye face the right way and get rid of the thumb, right? You replaced someone who's essentially like unique and moody and opinionated and all of these things with a much less skilled, disempowered and an interchangeable technician, right? Who you can just like get rid of at a moment's notice and who can be replaced by anyone else. I think that's such an important point, right? And I think it's what we see constantly from the tech industry and from these innovations when they're sold as kind of world changing, going to automate everything, you know, democratization, even I'll come back to that point in just a second. But I just wanted to give a couple examples to kind of make this real for listeners as well, right? You know, there are some tech newsletters on Substack that are very popular.

And a number of months ago, I kind of noticed that these were people who used to work at kind of traditional tech publications, went to Substack to do their own thing, whatever, you know, totally fine. But the images they were using to kind of illustrate their stories were all from DALI and Stable Diffusion and generated like that because I guess they felt they didn't have the same kind of pressures or restrictions as a tech publication would. I don't think you see so many of those moving into AI art yet because there could be consequences of doing that. They don't know the full legal kind of ramifications of it. But these kind of substacks, which are very popular, were more than happy and continue to do it, right? And then on the other

hand, I saw, you know, you were talking about even lower wage destinations that some people go to, to hire illustrators who they can pay less money. I saw there was a story in rest of world about a month or so ago about illustrators in China who were doing video game illustrations. And they said that, you know, the company that they used to work for kind of got rid of them all and then started to use these AI generators and then brought them back and kind of paid rid of them all and then started to use these AI generators and then brought them back and kind of paid them like 10 times less than what they were being paid before, but just to kind of fix up the little issues with the AI art. And like, I'm sure that you have noticed and have heard other stories about how this is happening. Oh, absolutely. Al Jazeera

started using one of the generators to turn out comics that are telling various aspects of Middle Eastern history. Also, Semaphore is using generators for their videos right now and pretty adamantly defending them. One that I was just pretty heartbroken over was the Nieman Foundation, which is literally a journalism thing. If you look on their website, I want to say like about 40% of their illustrations that they have are done with generators. No way. I honestly had no idea about that. And that is kind of shocking to me, actually. I think it comes from like the lack of respect that they have for visual artists. I do not think Neiman would allow 30% or 40% of their articles to be written by chat GPT. Yeah, absolutely. And going back to your point about labor, like we see this being used as you're talking about, and I've discussed, you know,

on artists, we also see it being used on journalists. There's a lot of kind of new media companies that have been laying off journalists recently and saying that they're going to start using AI for stories. And I think we can see that less as them kind of thinking that the AI is great and more taking advantage of a tech to come along and get rid of all these workers and scare the rest of them that are around to say, you know, you could comes to mind to me is in the mid 2010s, when there was all this discussion about how automation was going to replace all of these jobs and, you know, we needed to be worried and are we going to need a basic income? And like, this was all the discussion, right? All these truck drivers and, you know, service workers are going to lose their jobs because of automation. And what actually happens is they don't really lose their jobs, but there's a ton of new algorithmic management that is rolled out that gives more power to the employers over the workers. We see

it in Amazon warehouses. And so, you know, the Uber app and kind of how that gives them a lot more power over what used to be taxi workers and are now kind of ride hailing drivers. So we see this time and again. And now I think what we see with this generative AI is it moving into or kind of expanding into other spaces like writing, like art, and to say, you know, don't push back too hard or else we supposedly can replace you with these things, even though they won't be nearly as good. But, you know, that doesn't matter to capital as much, right? No, exactly. I mean, there's two things. Like, first, they won't be nearly as good, so we'll hire low-wage people to fix them up. But then the second thing that happens is they won't be nearly as good, but you'll get just get used to crap. I mean, they did that with architecture a long time ago. Look at the buildings we live in now.

You're completely right, though, right? And they've already been degrading like the quality of, you know, the entertainment that you get from these major kind of mega corporations already. So they only have to go so far to get us used to what's coming next, I guess. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one of the things that the Writers Guild was really so smart about in pushing back against AI is it's not that they think that like, you know, this magical AI is going to write The Sopranos. It's not that. It's that these companies will use AI maybe to generate a concept for a script or to like

generate like a bunch of like incomprensible schlock and then hire a real writer to rewrite it, but then say you don't have copyright to it. Because we have copyright to it because we had this machine excrete some crap that you had to, you know, make usable. Absolutely. No, you've put it so well. I mentioned earlier, there's often this kind of narrative or discourse of democratization that comes with these new tech tools, right? You know, the technology is out there, this is going to democratize access to information, or this is going to democratize kind of access to various skills. And, you know, I don't know if you saw this story, but about a month or so ago, there was a YouTube channel that does kind of animation,

and they use one of these text generators to kind of create a short animated video. But instead of using the actual work of animators to animate this sort of video, they recorded it and then ran the stills or the frames of it through an AI art generator. And when they received kind of criticism for doing that, they said, actually, this is democratization of the tools of animation. So now we don't need to actually have the skills. We can just use these tools. What do you make of such a ridiculous argument? Is that like, it just is, you know? I mean, there's so many things. I mean, it reminds me how much people have stopped viewing themselves

as creators and producers and started viewing themselves as consumers. And that their fundamental right is to like get as much crap as they possibly fucking can. And to hell with the person who creates it. It's like saying forever 21 democratized fashion and who cares how many, you know, Bangladeshi seamstresses die in the building collapses, you know, my fashion has been democratized. I have 87 nylon dresses. I feel like what these things are actually doing is they're democratizing poverty, right? They're democratizing precarity. They are democratizing not having a job. No, you're completely right. As usual. You know, we talked a bit about how these tools actually work. Can you talk to us a bit about how they use the art that is already

out there in these data sets in order to kind of create these images? Like where do they get the images that they then churn out as the AI image generation that they're supposedly doing? This is a really good question. For some of the generators like Dolly, which is owned by OpenAI, we have no idea because they don't tell us. They are just like a black mysterious box. However, for Stable Diffusion, which is run by Stability AI, we do. And Stable Diffusion did a really neat little trick. They gave a lot of money to a German nonprofit called Lion. And then this German nonprofit suctioned up 5.8 billion images from around the Internet without anyone's consent, compensation, even knowledge, and not just art, not just copyrighted images, but people's private medical images.

They suctioned all of this up and they gave it to Stability AI. And they were like, we are just a little humble European nonprofit. But in actuality, they were like a fig leaf. They were like a condom of nonprofitness hiding the fact that they were acting as procurers for stability. And so then Stability, which is run by a former hedge fund boss, Ahmad Mostak, the reason why the generators have any sort of like looking human. It's because they stole our artwork. They are only as good as their data sets. They do not produce anything themselves. If they had to just be trained on their own stuff, which is what's going to happen soon, they will eventually devolve into a nightmare world of like 20 million teethed aliens with

bunions for eyes. So yeah, they're built on our stolen work. These billion dollar corporations stole our work to build tools to replace us. It's so frustrating to hear it, right? And I think that part of the thing that really stands out is that, you know, something like this would not be possible if they weren't able to kind of totally scrape the web and just take everything that we've been sharing online for all of these years. And in one of the pieces you wrote, you said that generative AI is another transfer of wealth from working artists to Silicon Valley billionaires. And that clearly shows you how, right? They've taken all the work of artists like you and many other artists who have shared their work online or even just, you know, everyday people who shared images of themselves online and all this kind of stuff that they've taken to.

And that forms the basis of their entire company, their entire tool. And certainly it has this kind of, when you use it and you type in your little prompt, it has this kind of almost magical feeling like, oh my God, how did it put this thing together? But really it's just taking pieces of all these images that it has. And because it has so many, it's trying to fit them back together. And I think that we really need to be aware of that instead of kind of falling for the mystique, which is so often what can happen with these tech tools. Exactly, exactly, exactly. They are nothing without the stolen images and they're nothing

without the Silicon Valley ethos of move fast, break things, damn the consequences. Let's make all our money while we can and try to make ourselves seem inevitable. Totally, totally. And, you know, now it's hitting, well, I guess in some ways it has been hitting artists for a while, but, you know, now it's really coming for them in a really significant way. I'm wondering when we look at the risk, we've talked about kind of the inequities here, and how it hits kind of the everyday illustrators much more than kind of the big artists who are in the galleries. And I feel like this is a conversation that we're kind of having with the writer's strike as well, right? Recognizing that it's not just kind of big A-list actors that

make money from movies, but there's a lot of people who go into kind of the creation of these things that we don't often realize. I feel like the public doesn't have a good understanding of how art gets created or how these things kind of come into being, you know, that they enjoy, that they like to experience. Do you think that that's also an important part of kind of improving the education of the public on how all this art actually gets made that, you know, they see on their news stories and the journalism and on the book covers that they enjoy and all these sorts of things that many people, I feel like don't really realize. I think it's a very important thing. And also,

I think that a lot of people who aren't artists, they just think that the reason that I can draw is because of some magical talent that an angel gave me one day. And, you know, the angel like whacked me on the head when I was like three years old. And then I was just gave me one day. And, you know, the angel like whapped me on the head when I was like three years old. And then I was just a genius. Right. And that's not true. I mean, that's just not how it is for anyone. Like the reason that we are able to draw these pictures is because we gave our lives to it. And maybe we were like better at doing crayon drawings than the other little kids doing crayon drawings. But the actual thing that made us artists is because we stuck with it for so many hours every day. And we gave up a lot, right, to do that. This is a skilled trade, the same way that being a carpenter is a

skilled trade, right? Same way being like a welder, an electrician, you know, is a skilled trade. We are people who combine doing something that's pretty sublime, right, which is making stuff up with the fact that we work with our hands with tools and chemicals. For my whole life, I've been critical of how artists sometimes position themselves in this like misty woo woo fairy tale realm, you know, and don't talk about like the sweat and the blood and the like labor of what we do. And I blame some of that for people not understanding this as much. I think we did it a bit ourselves by mystifying ourselves a bit, and I've always tried not to be mystical about it. And I've always tried to say that us as artists being

destroyed by this is just as bad when truck drivers have their lives turned to hell by some sort of evil algorithmic boss that doesn't let them take bathroom breaks. It's just as bad when truck drivers have their lives turned to hell by some sort of evil algorithmic boss that doesn't let them take bathroom breaks. It's just as bad when an Amazon worker has to wear some sort of digital tracking device that screams at them so that they lift more and more things onto shelves. It's not that artists are special mystical unicorn creatures. And that's why I fight for them. I fight for them because I'm an artist. That's my job. But all of us as workers need to be fighting this. Exactly. It's part of a similar trend that's just affecting so many different workers.

And just at different times, it hits different people. And we need to be kind of collectively pushing back on those things instead of just saying, oh, it only matters because it's artists or something like that. No, it matters when these technologies hit any workers, as you're saying. I wanted to talk about one piece that you mentioned in one of the pieces that you wrote, where you kind of called back to the history the history of the Luddites and, and kind of looking at the long history that we have as humans of recognizing when technologies aren't working for us, we should be able to kind of push back on them and really say no to them. Can you talk to us about how that has kind of, you know, inspired some of your thinking on technology and these AI image generators in particular? It's a really good question. I, like everyone else who challenges this stuff, have been yelled at a lot and called a stupid Luddite.

This is the standard term for anyone who thinks that, I don't know, it's a poor idea to have AI-powered machine guns or whatever. Yeah, I think many listeners of this podcast will be familiar with being kind of criticized in that way. So I decide, I'm like, why don't I brush up and remind myself, right, of the history of the Luddites to see what was going on. And what I found was that they were like me, skilled tradesmen with a lot of autonomy who had seen that, you know, destroyed by giant mechanical looms that, you know, were powering the satanic mills of Manchester and being operated by people who were making pennies and who were working in these like factories where they were like crushing their fingers and where their kids were being crushed under things all the time.

And they didn't like it. And they decided to protest against it. And one tactic of protest, a very legitimate and time-honored tactic of protest, was to smash the machines. That was the first thing I learned. So it was a smart and accurate labor critique. The second thing that I learned was I learned that the Luddites were not stopped because of the inevitability of technological progress. The Luddites were not stopped because technology moves forward and they were in the past. No, they were stopped because England sent an army that basically occupied the territories they were involved in and killed them all. That's why they shipped them to Australia as prisoners.

That's why they were stopped. They were stopped because of state violence. I think that this is a really, really important thing for people to know that it's not that, you know, technological progress is inevitable. It's that technological progress is backed by power and often by violence. And that's why it's adopted something that's forced is inevitable. It's that technological progress is backed by power and often by violence. And that's why it's adopted something that's forced on people, these types of technologies that make their lives worse. And the truth is, for all of the amazing things that have happened since the Luddites, people are still dying in sweatshops that make textiles all the time. We still haven't made a humane way to do it.

And I've often thought about when people say like adopt or die, that's another thing a lot of these shills say. And what does it mean to adopt? What would it have meant for the Luddites to adopt? What it would have meant is for them to work in sweatshops, right? For them to have been impoverished, to have given up their autonomy, to have given up the ability to work in their own homes, to have given up making money and have worked in horrific conditions. And perhaps not even that, because there's a lot of out of work, textile workers too. There was no good thing where the Luddite grinds and has good grind set. And then he learns the textile machine. And then he like learns, you know, the

textile machine. And I don't know, he has some sort of like Andrew Tate superstar life. That's not how it works, right? The actual thing that people mean when they say adopt is they mean submit. Yeah, you're making me think of like Twitter back in the Luddite times and like the people kind of tweeting out threads of how you can be like a good factory worker. And yeah, you know, obviously, I think what you said is essential. And I think like the key point of that is that technological development and the path that it takes is inherently political, right? It's not something that just emerges from this tech industry. It's shaped by capital, and it's shaped by the state as well. And you know,

the interest that they have in kind of facilitating the continuation of the capitalist process, right? I'm wondering, we've been talking about these image generators and what they might mean for artists. What is kind of the worst case scenario that you see as potentially kind of coming out of this if we're not able to push back on them and they are able to kind of entrench themselves in the way that the industry would like to see? Well, the worst case scenario for illustrators is we just no longer exist. That there is just no more illustration as a career path, that it just maybe is like a hobby for some, you know, rich kids. Maybe there's like three elite illustrators

working now, you know, fingers crossed I'm one of them, you know, but the rest it's just over, right? And also that there's no path for young people to get into the industry anymore because young people don't start on like VIP cool projects. They start on like the crappy little projects, the ones most likely to be taken over, you know, by a generator. So that's the first thing. It's just, it's just the destruction of illustration as a field. And with that, the like massive impoverishment of the visual world, the further like uglification of everything. The sort of concerns for larger society, besides just everything being ugly and stupid, is obviously the lack of any sort of ability to discern visual truth, because people are seeing fake images all the time. We've already

seen so many people fooled by fake images of everything from like the Turkish earthquake to the Pope in a big puffy parka. This is, you know, sort of like a separate thing from what I'm talking about. But I just think the real thing is, yeah, everything just being uglier and worse and people forgetting how to draw stuff anymore. Yeah, I don't want an ugly and stupid world. I'd like, you know, kind of a rich and cultural society. And, you know, if you think about it, like one of the issues here is obviously these generators are trained on images that already exist, right? Those are styles that exist and people who have already made art. And so if we're kind of, you know, cutting off the pipeline for new artists to get into the field, if we're giving

fewer opportunities for illustrators like yourself and many others to kind of, you know, develop their work, develop their style, you know, get their art out into the world, then we're kind of stuck with what has already existed. And there can be no evolution in kind of the art and the culture that is available to people because now the AIs are making everything. And even though, you know, the people in charge might want to say that these AIs are intelligent and blah, blah, blah, they're not. They're just using what has come before and kind of mixing it up and churning it out in a different way so that it can try to make something that fits with the prompt that the person is putting in there. But clearly that's a continued impoverishment, both for the wider public, but also for artists

and illustrators themselves who won't have these opportunities to work on these things. Like it's a very human loss getting back to what we were saying earlier in the conversation. Exactly. It's just this incredible human loss. And I, I just sometimes think about the psychology, right? Of the people behind it and how demented it is for such supposedly smart people. There really does seem to be a strain in Silicon Valley that believes that everything in the world is reducible to ones and zeros, you know, like binary code that believes that everything in the world is reducible to ones and zeros, you know, like binary code that believes that you can take absolutely anything and break it down into something that is, you know, mechanical into something that's like a machine. Like I see all the time, tech people say like the brain is a computer, which isn't true. No neuroscientist

will ever say that it's total bullshit, but it just shows how they understand everything. It's like, because their world is computers, everything is reducible to computers. And I think what they're trying to do is they're trying to just take creativity and just make it reducible to some sort of like, you know, equation, right. To bottle it and to separate it from the humans who are actually the source of it. Absolutely. In the same way, they say that the brain is a computer, you know, they kind of diminish human intelligence, human thought, like the real complexity and even the unknown that still kind of exists in our thought process. And then to extend that to creativity, you know, just to reduce creativity to ones and zeros takes so much out of that equation that is just so inherently human that we need to hold on to that's so essential for like our culture. It just makes me angry like to think about it. Well, I remember I was listening to one of your episodes is about long termism. And me and my boyfriend, we're just listening to this. And we're listening to these guys that are like, well, what if there are these many units of happiness, these utils? And what if the units of

happiness can be experienced by an artificial intelligence and not a human? And what if you could have like a planet that you colonized with artificial intelligence? That's like playing video games. Wouldn't that be better than like, you know, people not starving here because you have more utils. I was listening to this and I was like, what the hell, man? What are these guys smoking? What is this? But I think it's the same sort of thing. It's like, you have people that are so demented and they're so high on this like weird techie logic that they think that you can reduce creativity to like weird, you know, arithmetic problems. You can reduce happiness to a utile. You can reduce morality to colonizing a planet in future time with video game playing robots. I mean,

this is madness. Absolute madness. And it shows why we need to aggressively fight this kind of vision of the world that they are trying to push on us. It's so many different domains and the image generation tools are just one of them. I'm wondering, obviously we've started to see some pushback against this, right? Some companies have been filing lawsuits, some artists have been pushing back. What are you seeing in kind of the fight back and the pushback that's happening now? And how do you assess its potential success and what it might mean for these generation tools? There's a few aspects to the pushback. First of all, I have to, I just have to shout out Carla Ortiz, like who is a concept artist who's been really helming the fight against these generators

and who is one of the three lead plaintiffs in the artist class action lawsuit. She has just been such a force for fighting this and such an advocate for artists of huge respect. So she's leading a class action lawsuit for mass copyright infringement against Stability AI, DeviantArt, which allowed everything on its side to be scraped, and also against Midjourney. And that, you know, that lawsuit is going through the courts right now. I think the company's asked for it to be thrown out. It's not being thrown out. Who knows when it will be settled? I feel like these things take many years, but like God bless her, right? There's also a lawsuit that Getty Images is doing for trillions of dollars because of the mass theft of all of the work in like,

basically, like all their archives were scraped. And it's so transparent that they're mashed up versions of their watermark are even appearing, you know, on generated work in the EU, which actually respects artists a lot more than the US. I think it just released the AI Act, which at the very least, I mean, it's not perfect, but at least it says that before stuff like chat GPT is released to the public, it has to actually like be reviewed by the governments, which is pretty huge. In addition to like these legal things, in addition to, you know, a lot of, you know, hearings with legislators, there's also sort of the cultural pressure. And that's what my open letter was aiming to do. It was aiming to provide a space for people that were like, this is not okay.

This has to be opposed. If you're a publication that is using AI generated work, you were doing something deeply unethical and immoral. You're kicking artists in the face, in fact, and you're going to be called out on it. And this has not actually been useless. For instance, Nature Magazine just announced a complete ban on any AI-generated images or videos. They say they lack integrity and that everything has to be human-generated. And I hope that many more places follow suit. I think that it's incredibly counterproductive for publications to be using AI-generated work, which at the end of the day makes their work no different from that of their competitors and eliminates any sort of uniqueness they might've had. So yeah, there's that cultural aspect.

And ultimately, I mean, there just needs to be regulation. Like we need to be calling on elected officials, you know, corrupt and venal, though most of them are, we do need to be calling on them to regulate these companies because the thing is that, you know, artists were like a tiny little minority, but this is coming for basically every white collar worker and the societal disruptions and the just human suffering that's going to be caused by so many people losing their work is going to be hideous. It's going to be monstrous. And it's not something that any society can afford, you know? Absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, as you were discussing that and, you know, the publications using it and things like that, it brought to mind how one of the sub stacks that I mentioned earlier that, you know, really popular

kind of tech sub stack, one of their articles have been kind of taken and kind of reworded by, you know, how there are these websites that exist that often take articles off of major publications and do the same sort of thing. And this had happened to his kind of substack blog and an AI, I guess, had been used to kind of rephrase something that he had written, one of these posts that he had written. And he was furious. And I was like, you're using AI art. He's like, but words are smart and art is stupid. Right? Yeah. It's like when it affects me, it's bad. But when I do it to other people, it's completely okay. Exactly. 100%. Oh, my God. Yeah. So it was just shocking for me to see that. And it came back to mind as you were

describing these things. I wonder, you know, you talked about regulation there. You talked about kind of the lawsuits that are ongoing. Obviously, you know, we kind of want to see these things succeed in order to kind of halt what is going on with these image generators to make it difficult for them to kind of use all these scraped images to just take images from people and, you know, put them into their tools. I'm wondering how you see kind of the use of copyright in order to fight these things. Because I feel like, you know,

a lot of people who have been involved in kind of tech activism for a number of years were kind of skeptical or critical of the copyright system and how it exists, you know, because of the long copyright terms, because of how it could be used against people who are sharing music and things like that, right? And it does still exist today, you know, a strong movement, you know, not so much around getting rid of copyright, but reforming copyright. And I feel like now we're kind of in this moment, as we see these image generators take off, to kind of think about what the impact and the role of copyright actually is. Because I feel like after a long time of being kind of skeptical of copyright, it does feel like that is a really important tool in trying to stop

something like these image generators, even if all the terms of it aren't necessarily something that you might love. No, I absolutely agree with you. One of my real frustrations with the open letter was I've had talks with, you know, some of my, and these are people I think are brilliant. These are my comrades, but they're people who are copy left people. Right. You know, there are people who have given a huge amount of time and thought to fighting against, you know, like Disney fighting against the record labels. But when it comes to this moment, they have nothing useful to say for me as an artist. Nothing, zilch, zero. Basically, they just don't have anything to say because the one actual tool that we can use to fight these generators is something that they are ideologically opposed to. And they spent their whole lives struggling against and, you know, copyright,

especially the way it is in America, like, obviously, it's very flawed. But as an artist, it's all we have, like, I don't get like a pension, right? I don't have any safety net. Like the only way that I get any money when, for instance, like my repetitive stress injuries and my hand is bad and I can't work is that people pay me for stuff I've already done. And the only reason they very precarious people have because I don't know you want to like remix something with Mickey Mouse I don't get it man I don't get it if not cruel it's like kind of pie in the sky ideological and just doesn't speak to the realities of what people like me are facing at all like in any way personally like I oppose the idea that copyright should extend 70 years after your death. That's ridiculous. If I was running things, I don't think you should be able to sell your copyright, frankly. I think it's inane that corporations should own copyright to anything. You know,

Jack Kirby should have that copyright, right? Not Marvel, not DC. But I do think that people should have the right to control how their creations are used the same way I think I should have the right to control how my data is used, how my nude photos are used, how everything of me is used. I don't see why it's wrong that I should want to control things that I gave my life to and my soul to and all my work to. And I don't see why I have to provide it as fodder for billion dollar corporations whose goal is to colonize a planet with AI that plays video games. Yeah, I completely agree with you. You know, I have been skeptical of copyright in the past. I still think that as it exists right now, it's kind of a blunt tool. You know, the terms are too long and things like that. But I

completely accept and agree that in this moment, it's kind of the best tool or one of the best tools that we have in order to fight this. And I don't see any problem in embracing it to do that. Right. And, you know, one of the things that really stood out to me, you know, you were talking about kind of copy left movement and people who've been critical of that, not necessarily being kind of helpful allies in this moment when it comes to artists, Joanne McNeil, who, you know, is a critic who I greatly respect brought to my attention that there was, you know, a blog or an article published by creative comm Commons, I believe is their name, back in February, that was arguing that the use and the scraping of the internet to take all these images and all of this text and all of these resources to train these generative AI things

should be considered fair use. I wish I never gave some of my work on Creative Commons. I wish I could take it back. God, I despise them. Yeah, it just angered me so much to see that, right? Because it's clearly not okay. And as we were talking about before, it's clearly an example of all of this work that has been done by many different people to fill out the kind of World Wide Web, the internet, whatever we want to call it, now being kind of absorbed and consumed by these very small number of incredibly large corporations that have the amount of power and resources to be able to do that for their personal benefit. The idea that we should fight to help them do that is just ridiculous. It's insane, but it's like this is what happens when you become so ideological, right?

That you refuse to look at how the world is changing. I had a very, very smart friend who once told me that she felt like the intellectual problem these people are having is they think that the good guys still have the internet, but the good guys lost it. Absolutely. Long ago, unfortunately. You talked earlier about the Writers Guild and the Writers Strike. And what we see is that, you know, some unions are fighting to, you know, protect their members in this moment, the Writers Guild, the screen actors, of course, thinking about how AI might be used in those professions. Does the lack of a union for illustrators make that a bit more difficult to kind of collectively organize in order to try to combat things like these AI image generators? Oh, hugely, obviously. Like, the fact that we don't have any power whatsoever collectively that there's no

like closed shops and illustration there's no like shops like I mean and there kind of couldn't be the way that like the freelance illustration industry works like it's just it's just not that way I mean I can imagine something where like concept artists or animators like people who are all like working you know like in Hollywood or working you know for one company or whatever that I can see you know collectively organizing but oh my, like my part of the industry, it's like a bunch of cats running this way and that it's really been very sad how little collective force we have. I mean, we have some kind of professional advocacy groups, which I don't think have been like particularly helpful personally, but we have nothing that's like the Writers Guild, and God,

I wish we did. Because I think that the reason that we in particular are so targeted by these companies is that we don't have collective union representation. And we also don't have a bunch of mean lawyers like, you know, the record industry does. That's such a good point. And it's so unfortunate that that is the case, of course. I wonder, as we start to wind down this conversation, this has been so fascinating and so important a conversation to have, right? Because these image generators are out in the world. And I think people do need a critical understanding of the potential impact that they could have. And I think that they're getting that in far too few places. And you kind of intervening in this conversation with your

piece in the LA Times and the open letter that you co-wrote and some of the interviews that you've been doing is so important, right? Because we need more perspectives like yours to actually illustrate to people what this might mean. Is there anything that we didn't talk about in this conversation that you think is important for people to understand? I think I just want to reiterate how important it is to fight back against this idea of inevitability. Because the reason that the tech industry speaks in terms of inevitability, it's just a strategy to keep people from resisting in the first place. And the more that we insist on our human agency and our ability to organize and our ability to fight even the most

well-funded foes, the more that we can take back some control. Because what we actually need is we need something that Kate Crawford termed the politics of refusal. We need to refuse the colonization of our lives and our creations by these companies. And to start doing that, we need to reject the idea that anything that they do is inevitable. Polly, I think that that is such a perfect place to leave this conversation, this kind of diminish what it means for art to be this very human thing instead of passing it over to machines and computers and algorithms. So I thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and continuing to do your advocacy on this work. Thank you so much. It's my pleasure. Molly Crabapple is an artist and the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun

with Marwan Hisham. You can follow Molly on Twitter at at Molly Crabapple is an artist and the author of two books, Drawing Blood and Brothers of the Gun with Marwan Hisham. You can follow Molly on Twitter at at Molly Crabapple. You can follow me at at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is produced by Eric Wickham and is part of the Harbinger Media Network. And if you want to support the work that goes into making the show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus

and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.