Molly Crabapple's Guardian piece argues that generative AI's mass scraping of art and writing amounts to history's largest art heist - billions of works taken without consent or payment to train models whose output then competes with the people whose labor built the datasets. She connects it to lawsuits, open letters, and the collapse of entry-level illustration gigs as knockoffs flood the market.
The essay isn't neutral tech optimism: it frames VC "inevitability" as politics and power, nods to labor history (including luddites as organized workers, not fools), and warns that what started with illustrators now touches journalism, books, and more. For readers tracking copyright and creative labor, it's a blunt manifesto-style stake in the ground.