A Love Letter for Artists Who Have Considered Suicide/Against Fake rAInbows or Performative Allyship

Dear artists and allies,

Over the past few years, I’ve read numerous posts by many artists who question whether life is worth living in the age of AI. Recent Reddit posts indicate artists are already committing suicide because they feel hopeless about their ability to make a living from art when their works—no matter how unique—can be stolen to fuel generative AI models and output “art.” (More examples of artists describing suicidal thoughts or intentions in response to generative AI overtaking their work and careers can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.)

In response to such sentiments, many who have the ability to act and who identify as arts allies have mostly done nothing or failed to actually address the root cause of the problem: artists are exploited (more now, thanks to unethical generative AI companies, than we have been for some time). We need allies, such as arts funders, to not only address the predictable consequences of increasingly rampant exploitation through mental health advocacy and treatment designed to prevent worse tragedies, but to actually eliminate the root of the problem: the, you know, exploitation.

How do we do this?

1. We need less performative allyship and more actual prevention and intervention—we need real allies in our industries, philanthropy, and the government sector to intervene in a timely fashion when corporations, such as AI companies, use us as unpaid labor. We need these allies to help build up a strong economy of mission-aligned independent publishers, studios, streaming platforms, labels, agencies, galleries, arts venues, etc. that will enable artists to release work under fair working conditions/contracts—to eliminate the monopolies that keep artists trapped in, essentially, terrible working conditions. We also need them to do their utmost to match the tech industry’s lobbying efforts.We have the people power. The public overwhelmingly supports artists fighting against this new form of exploitation. According to Variety’s “Generative AI & Licensing: A Special Report,” which was published in October 2024, approximately 75% of Americans strongly support artists’ rights to not have our copyrighted works used without our consent and without adequate compensation and credit. Why haven’t arts funders, by and large, risen to the occasion and listened to the pleas of artists, most of whom (like the general public) do not think it is OK for generative AI companies to use an artist’s works to train generative AI without that artist’s consent? Are these funders reliant on donations from the tech sector or individuals in tech that now prevent them from carrying out their stated missions? If you’re a sincere ally who works for or is connected to an arts funder, please join artists everywhere in speaking up and taking action against allowing AI companies to exploit artists as unpaid labor.
2. From our communities/the grassroots, we need fewer fake fans who engage in piracy even when they could afford to pay for our work (see this article, which includes an aerial shot of a piracy website owners’ extremely large and luxurious home in a very expensive part of the world) and, especially, not those who then justify piracy as anti-capitalist in a world that remains very capitalist for the artists whose works they consume. Like, maybe redistribute corporate wealth and dismantle the top/exploitative corporations—the steeples, minarets, and penthouse rooftops of capitalism—first before coming after already exploited and underpaid artists who, like most workers and probably like you, mostly constitute the bottom or the foundation and the middle or the load-bearing (emphasis on bearing) walls of the economic system you despise? Otherwise, I find your so-called anarchy/socialism fake; pretentious; or, at best, irrational and simply ideological. Stop succumbing to the divide-and-conquer tactics of Big Tech and the 1%, which pit you against fellow workers—namely, the majority of artists—who are at the same or lower economic level than you are! We need the public to be better educated about what piracy, including this latest iteration that has come in the form of generative AI, actually does to the livelihoods of artists (e.g., musicians) who are not well-known and wealthy (which is the majority of musicians). Spoiler alert: In music, piracy helps already successful musicians and hurts those who are emerging. So your piracy maintains the status quo you say you despise.
3. Among artists, we need more offline and local engagement, as well as more collaboration between grassroots arts organizations (in the arts, labor, climate justice, conservation, international development, and other stakeholder spaces) on the issue of techsploitation—an issue that, thanks to the tech sector’s unchecked influence on the most powerful person in the world, is now front and center for everyone. Again, what is happening in front of all our eyes should be proof enough that artists are not irrational. The world (it should now be plain for all, but especially for those of us in the United States, to see) is, increasingly, run by Silicon Valley and Wall Street sociopaths and psychopaths who are mostly concentrated in the tech sector. In the Global North, artists have been among the first who have been compelled to fight the techsploitation that is now bleeding into other sectors of economies. If you’re new here (e.g., someone who has recently been affected by a tech mogul’s random takeover of your workplace), welcome to the fight!

As with all struggles, what we artists are experiencing stems from a lack of empathy on the part of the generative AI sector and its various beneficiaries. If, for example, we could see the children in the Congo, who are more extreme victims of techsploitation (of the Global North’s thirst and greed for minerals that power our devices), as our own children, then we would join arms with Congolese activists. The source of our suffering is the same. However, our inability to see them as us prevents us from stepping up. That is our shortcoming and is part of what hampers movement building.

On the other side, the reality is that not even psychopaths would do to others what psychopaths do if they were to experience, totally (and I do mean completely), the impacts of their actions on those they victimize. No thief wants to be stolen from. However, their inability to empathize (to inhabit the suffering of others)—the overriding and overwhelming “me first” impulse that is particular to psychopaths—prevents them from stepping up for what is right.

And then, of course, there are the flying monkeys who are there to enable the psychopaths or to cheer them on and feed on the scraps of their prey. Many are not even aware they play this role—so overwhelming is the profit motive.

While many of those in the latter group—people who could do better for the world but live in elite tech bubbles—worship the words of tech moguls like Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Peter Thiel (white men who were born into relative affluence), the wisest advice I ever encountered did not come from the mouth of a privileged and grossly rich white man. It came from a humble but successful boat builder in an extremely poor African nation who was truly self-made and acquired his small fortune by steadfastly investing his meager earnings into his craft until he was finally able to hire others and, thereby, create jobs in a place where many struggle to survive. He said, “Life is about patience.”

So, to fellow artists in a world that seems to value the fruits (our art) but casts away the seeds (us), may today give you the patience to keep finding your patience. And I don’t just mean that as a clever ending. I think you will know what this means when you experience it, perhaps in something as simple as encountering a genuinely kind fellow human or stumbling upon a startling, small surprise that means more to you than it might to anyone else, and then learn to seek this again . . . and again . . . and again.