AI Image Generation: The Next Big Thing Silicon Valley Is Pushing

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Earlier this year, you put together an open letter with the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting. 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 and how I came to realize what was going on with these generators. And everyone I knew in the illustration community started to get very worried when we learned that all of these image generators were only good because they were all trained on our images.

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.