It's just so perverse.

I truly don't understand why anyone would decide to burn tons and tons and tons of carbon for the sole purpose of stealing a job that people love to do.

Music Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Molly Crabapple.

Molly is an

artist and writer based in New York. She's the author of two books, Drawing Blood, and Brothers

of the Gun with Marwan Hasham. I've been following Molly's work for a long time. She's an artist

who has illustrated so many important events over the past decade or so, you know, political

events that have happened over that

period of time. And I feel like if you're on the left, her art has just become unescapable.

But of course, in the past six months to a year, as generative AI has been growing in this

conversation, as we've seen the impacts of tools like chat gbt, but most importantly for this conversation

of image generation tools like stable diffusion, mid-jorney, and Dolly. A lot of artists and

illustrators have become concerned about what this might mean for their profession. Not so much

because these tools are great at replicating their works, you know, at making things that are

better than them and at being a better artist, but because it can be very cheap for corporations

and for companies to generate images that are kind of passable very quickly and then maybe

pay an artist to kind of fix it up later. It presents a real threat to the livelihoods

of illustrators like Molly and especially many of the people who are just trying to get

started in this industry, who are trying to find their style, who are trying to get their kind of

first jobs. This could really wipe that out for them. A lot of the focus of the generative AI

hype has been around the chatbots and chat

GBT, but this image aspect of it is also incredibly important as we think about, you know,

...