AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation, Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks
It addresses ethical concerns for artists and broader AI ethics, highlighting exploitation in creative labor.
The paper analyzes arguments that AI image generation constitutes unethical labor theft, concluding that it exploits creative workers and could extend to other AI applications.
Since the launch of applications such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, generative artificial intelligence has been controversial as a tool for creating artwork. While some have presented longtermist worries about these technologies as harbingers of fully automated futures to come, more pressing is the impact of generative AI on creative labour in the present. Already, business leaders have begun replacing human artistic labour with AI-generated images. In response, the artistic community has launched a protest movement, which argues that AI image generation is a kind of theft. This paper analyzes, substantiates, and critiques these arguments, concluding that AI image generators involve an unethical kind of labour theft. If correct, many other AI applications also rely upon theft.