Generative AI image tools like Midjourney have scraped billions of images from the internet without artist consent or compensation, according to creators fighting back through lawsuits and open letters. The practice has devastated the illustration industry, eliminating entry-level positions where young artists once learned their craft, while tech companies defend the approach as inevitable progress .

What Exactly Happened to Artists' Work?

In 2022, artist and author Molly Crabapple noticed something disturbing: knockoffs of her work were flooding the internet. These weren't exact copies, but strange facsimiles that captured her style in degraded form. She soon discovered the reason: AI image generators had scraped her entire body of work from the internet and fed it into their training systems. "It was not my work exactly," she explained. "It was instead a strange facsimile, as if done by a none-too-talented teenager on tranquilisers, all my lines and blotches reduced to rote" .

The problem extended far beyond Crabapple's portfolio. Billions of images were harvested from the internet without credit, compensation, or even consent from the artists who created them. This wasn't a bug in the system; it was the foundation of how these tools work. In January 2023, three illustrators named Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz launched a lawsuit against leading image-generation companies Midjourney and Stability AI, claiming the two companies "violated the rights of millions of artists." The lawsuit remains contested and ongoing .

Why Are Tech Companies Defending This Practice?

The tech industry's response to these concerns has been dismissive. Back in 2023, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen claimed that enforcing copyright law would "kill" the entire AI industry. Tech companies, he suggested, would simply "move fast and break things," and the things being broken would be artists' livelihoods .

The contempt for creative workers runs deeper than legal arguments. In 2024, OpenAI's chief technology officer Mira Murati told an interviewer that the creative jobs destroyed by her company's products maybe "shouldn't have been there in the first place." Such statements reveal what Crabapple calls "the deep anti-humanism of the tech elite," a class that views human creativity and the friction of learning a craft as obstacles rather than values .

How Are Artists Fighting Back?

Resistance has taken multiple forms. In 2023, journalist Marisa Mazria Katz and Crabapple launched an open letter with a simple demand: keep AI-generated images out of newsrooms. The letter attracted thousands of signatures from creators around the world. Beyond advocacy, artists have pursued legal action, with the Andersen, McKernan, and Ortiz lawsuit representing one of the most significant challenges to AI companies' training practices .

These efforts reflect a broader pattern of creative workers defending their way of life against technological displacement. Crabapple draws a parallel to the Luddites, often caricatured as primitive machine-smashers but actually skilled artisans fighting against textile sweatshops powered by child labor. "Luddites were skilled artisans, fighting for their way of life against the 'satanic mills,'" she noted. "They did not lose to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical force" .

What's the Real Cost of This Technology?

The damage extends beyond individual artists. Three years after the open letter was launched, AI has torn through the already fragile illustration industry. Many of Crabapple's colleagues are out of work. More critically, the entry-level illustration gigs where young artists once learned their trade have been annihilated. This pattern is repeating across countless creative industries, with human workers replaced by what Crabapple calls "digital homunculi, trained on our stolen creations" .

The quality of AI-generated work is often poor, but that scarcely matters to companies deploying these tools. Generative AI functions as a tool to discipline and eliminate human workers, with the expectation that audiences will simply adapt to lower-quality output. This is marketed as progress, even as it hollows out creative professions and eliminates the pathways through which new artists develop their skills .

Steps Artists and Advocates Are Taking to Address AI Image Generation

• Legal Action: Filing lawsuits against AI companies like Midjourney and Stability AI to challenge the legality of scraping artwork without consent, with cases like the Andersen, McKernan, and Ortiz lawsuit still ongoing in courts.
• Public Advocacy: Launching open letters and speaking at industry conferences to raise awareness about the impact of AI on creative workers and demand policies that protect artists' rights and work.
• Industry Resistance: Organizing within creative communities to refuse AI-generated work in professional settings, such as the effort to keep AI-generated images out of newsrooms and editorial publications.

What Broader Issues Does This Raise?

The scraping of artwork for AI training is just one symptom of a larger problem. AI companies' inappropriate data collection extends far beyond illustration. It encompasses the billions of dollars these companies squander annually, the carbon they burn in data centers, the rare minerals in their chips, the land on which their infrastructure sits, and ultimately culture, education, sanity, and human imagination itself .

In return for access to the entirety of the human and non-human world, Crabapple argues, tech companies offer only dystopia. "Their fantasy future contains neither meaningful work nor real communities, just robots chattering to each other, leaving nothing for us," she stated. The question facing creative workers and society more broadly is whether this outcome is truly inevitable, or whether it reflects choices made by those with money and power .

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