AI Art is Theft.
Before the rise of ChatGPT, Gemini, and so, so many more generative-AI tools, Indie Publishing had a glaring problem that many empathized with: Fledgling writers wanted to get their work out there, but artists, cover designers, and editors were beyond their reach.
Reader expectations, though, were understandably high. Readers, myself included, want polished stories and are attracted by authentic, high-quality covers and clean, concise blurbs.
In came AI. The first models weren’t very good at creating images, struggling to be passable. These companies first started training on licensed images and images free in the public domain. But, like most companies, they wanted more money.
They decided, “To heck with it,” and designed tools to scrape everything and anything off the internet. Licensing didn’t matter. They wanted more money, so they decided to take IP they had no rights to and “transform it.”
The only problem? It’s not a transformative use. They are training their tools to generate like-kind images to compete with the very artists they’re stealing from. Kind of like this:
Since making this decision, artists, editors, and even authors have been made obsolete. The internet is already being flooded with AI-generated content, and it’s all… terrible. Actual, authentic art is being buried.
We have AI-generated news, videos, music, books, art, ads, homework, academic essays, scams and games. And so on, and so on.
Buzzfeed recently announced it will use AI for content creation. They cut their workforce by 12% (mostly writers), and their stock price went up 200%.
For us independent authors, multiple e-book and print book distributors have changed processes after a surge in AI-generated book publications (50% daily increase in new titles since ChatGPT). The quality of these books is currently relatively poor. That won’t be the case when these companies decide to steal our content to further train their models. In the future, these companies may choose to end their indie publishing services. And these AI companies do not care. They want more money.
Online communities where authors collaborate are drowning in arguments between the pro-AI and anti-AI crowd. The pro-AI crowd primarily consists of new writers. They do not yet see the harm in their use of generative AI. They need to be made to.
I’m personally committing to all my readers that I will never use generative AI in my work. This industry matters. Artists, editors, authors, and readers all matter. These AI companies can go suck an egg.
