OpenAI Is Declaring War On Creatives

Without us, they would be nothing

Image: “No brains allowed” / Badly edited by author

*warning, I’m off on another rant*

The biggest irony of Generative AI is that without the tireless, dedicated craft of creatives from all industries, the frankly mediocre products released so far wouldn’t even exist.

Think of all the writing in the world. That’s the backbone of ChatGPT and Perplexity AI. Think of all the YouTube and video content in the world. That’s the foundation of SORA, Luma Dream Machine, and the many other video generators that will soon exist. These LLMs are trained on our creative output — WITHOUT OUR PERMISSION OR COMPENSATION.

They’ve stolen creative output that we’ve spent blood, sweat and tears producing. 

They’ve stolen creative output that comes from us sharing our thoughts, knowledge, and vulnerabilities. 

They’ve stolen creative output that’s the result of our learning, practice, craft and years of dedication. 

Without that output, these companies would have nothing. They would be nothing. Guys like Sam Altman would still be nobodies. You’d think that would at least earn us some gratitude because it sure as shit didn’t earn us any dollars. Instead, the current face of the artificial intelligence hype train, OpenAI, and the overlords that control it are declaring war on creatives. It’s clearer than ever that their true motive is to turn creativity into a commodity and sell it back to us in some fancy GPT wrapper so we can fatten their wallets and inflate their egos.

This is evidenced by a recent video in which Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, was talking about how she feels AI is a collaborative tool that could help people be more “creative.” I put that in quotation marks because that’s exactly what she did. She air-quoted the word. Says a lot, right? But then came the real zinger, with Murati saying that “some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.” Her recent post on Twitter X was even worse, waxing lyrical about how AI tools are designed to “help improve human well-being” before stating the obvious: it will replace many jobs. (The comments make very theraputic reading.) 

Honestly, fuck these guys.

Who are they to sit there and say that artists or writers who get replaced by the products this company makes — that used the work of those very artists and writers to train on— deserved to lose their jobs and should never have had them in the first place? I can’t stand the hubris anymore. Even if I had an interest in AI, I couldn’t support a movement led by these sociopaths who are disconnected from reality. These people have made products that are struggling to find use cases, maintain users, and are failing to be profitable, not to mention the outrageous amounts of energy and water resources it takes to produce absolutely bang-average output. What gives them the divine right to talk down to creators like this? Take Altman — his CV is hardly worth writing about. And yet, there he is, talking about how he doesn’t care if OpenAI burns through the world’s money to build AGI (something he still can’t describe). 

Again, fuck these guys. 

There was probably a world where creative industries and Generative AI could have worked in tandem. OpenAI and others had a chance to do things properly — you know, like offer to pay for the content they stole before they stole it — and they could have collaborated with creative industries to build tools that were designed to help creatives be more creative. If they honestly did believe in collaboration and “democratizing creativity” — another phrase losing all meaning — that’s where they should have started. 

But that ship has sailed. 

The sad reality is that OpenAI will only be a successful company if it convinces the world that it doesn’t need creative industries and that they could instead pay a nice monthly fee for its services to generate creative output. Don’t think for a second they want to ‘help’ creatives be more creative — they’ll replace us in a heartbeat. If you could eradicate the need for creatives at scale and replace them with AI automation and generation, the money would come rolling in for AI companies. They know that. The pursuit of profit and growth will lead them down the path of actively trying to replace creatives because that’s the path that will generate the most income. And when it comes to “democratizing creativity,” Open AI is doing the opposite. It’s drowning the market with cheap AI output that’s de-levelling it, driving down prices and making it even harder for anyone to earn a living. 

As I wrote in GenAI is Trying to Kill Creativity, there is still hope. By making their disdain clear, they’ve encouraged creatives to join together and push back. By stealing our work, scraping our websites and ignoring the fundamental protocols of the Internet, and telling us over and over that they can replicate our work with the typing of a prompt, they’ve pissed us off. The anti-LLM movement is gaining momentum. And the more these AI overlords keep pushing, the harder creatives are going to push back. Say it quietly or shout it from the rooftops, but nobody — except corporations trying to pump their share price — wants generative AI and the sludge it produces to replace real, authentic, human creative output.

I sense the tide is turning, and I’m all for it.