In 2022, mollycrabapple 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 Diffusion, they each spat back sloppy facsimiles of her sketch of the ravaged Syrian city. Today, AI programs have become fully integrated into the internet. Critics say they steal reams of copyrighted art and writing, decimating artists’ livelihoods and dulling our ability to think and create on our own by removing our need to do so. Silicon Valley’s tech barons have predicted that AI will soon become inescapable in our daily lives, wiping out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and raising unemployment to 10 to 20% within the next five ye...