Can Artists Stop the AI Slop Machine?

Can Artists Stop the AI Slop Machine?

In 2022, Molly Crabapple noticed that several images uncannily resembling her distinctive illustrations of the Aleppo skyline and portraits of protesters had spread across the web. She realized that artificial intelligence companies had hoovered up her work, along with billions of other images on the Internet, to train models that convert blocks of text into images. When she typed her name into programs such as DALL-E, DreamStudio, and Stable Di…