Cover art by me.
Art and music are facing a difficult moment. Major companies are gathering millions of images, texts, and music tracks to train generative models, often without creators’ consent or compensation. Then they sell tools that can produce new images and music, sometimes deliberately imitating the work of the very people whose creations helped build those models.
What angers me isn’t the idea of new technology. It’s who profits from it, and at whose expense. Artists spend years developing their skills and bring their own experience to their work. Corporations treat that work as free raw material. Creators may have no way to opt out, no share of the profits, and no clear answer about whether their work was used at all.
“Democratizing creativity” is a convenient corporate slogan. Companies call it democratization when they take other people’s work, turn it into a commercial product, and keep the power to decide who can use it and on what terms. That doesn’t give people more power. It concentrates power in the hands of companies that own the models, the servers, the data, and the platforms.
We’re told that now anyone can “create.” But being able to press a button isn’t the same as having control over the tool, sharing in its profits, or having a say in the rules. Artists are expected to accept that their work may have been used without permission, then compete with products built from that same work. Meanwhile, corporations get a scalable business, paying customers, and a feel-good story about progress. How convenient: call appropriation innovation, call pushing workers out efficiency, and call not asking permission democratization.
If this is really about democratizing creativity, why don’t creators get a say in whether their work can be used? Why aren’t they given transparency and compensation? Why does “making creativity accessible to everyone” so often mean that a company gains control while the creator loses it?
This isn’t about saying only trained artists should be allowed to use AI, or that everyone needs years of practice before they can express themselves. The question is why corporations sell access to tools built on the large-scale use of other people’s work while offering those creators no meaningful choice and no fair share.
Democratization without creators’ consent or control isn’t creative freedom. It’s appropriation with a nicer marketing slogan.
