Since the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-1 back in 2018, generative artificial intelligence is increasingly present and active in several facets of everyday life. This new age of AI ushered in by tech corporations has been nothing short of disastrous for art: AI has threatened to replace human artists, stolen their art, and degraded its quality, integrity, diversity and character. AI content and its consequences threaten to lessen the very value of art itself as it infiltrates our daily media diet. 

A study by the University of Maryland found that more than 9% of all news content found in newspapers in the United States had text generated by AI. Different studies found that up to 53% of all books published in 2025 found on Amazon had some level of AI-involvement and over one-third of all publishing online showed signs of AI authorship since the release of ChatGPT. 

Other studies have found that AI was detected in about 40% of music released in July of this year, with more than half of that classified as fully AI-generated. Additionally, AI is becoming increasingly adopted in video creation, with 1.3 billion videos on TikTok explicitly labeled as AI-generated. 

Other studies have found that AI was detected in about 40% of music released in July of this year, with more than half of that classified as fully AI-generated. Additionally, AI is becoming increasingly adopted in video creation, with 1.3 billion videos on TikTok explicitly labeled as AI-generated. 

AI slop intrinsically devalues real art because it removes the human element from its creation. Instead of there being a uniquely human touch to videos online, a bot mass produces a homogenous style, narrowing the realm of artistic expression. 

The private sector, alongside the government and higher education, is subsidizing the deterioration of media and art. 

Educational institutions like USC are part of the problem here: In May 2026, USC was given $200 million from venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife in a grant to use AI “to accelerate breakthroughs in the health sciences, security, business and the arts.” An art student attending USC is unknowingly funding the force that is stripping them of their job, contributing to art theft, and measurably ruining media as they pay tuition including this AI partnership. 

Artificial intelligence is disarming and disenfranchising the creative, and USC is complicit in mutilating creative work and autonomy. Other universities are equally complicit, with colleges across the country pursuing similar AI initiatives including Princeton and the University of Florida as of 2025.

Statistical evidence corroborates widespread fears that AI actively dampens diverse perspectives and increasingly sanitizes writing and dialogue. Researchers from Imperial College London, the Internet Archive and Stanford University found that AI-generated websites were a third more semantically similar than non-AI-generated websites. On top of this, data appears to suggest that these trends are getting worse as time goes on, with AI’s promulgation corresponding to an increase in these flaws, with AI-generated or AI-assisted websites growing from 17.6% of all websites in May of 2023 to 35.3% in May of 2025. 

AI is also committing art theft. Legal proceedings in various accounts reveal tech firms siphoning millions of proprietary works through illegal, wrongful means in order to train AI chatbots. In September of last year, tech giant Anthropic agreed to pay book authors $1.5 billion in a class-action lawsuit in which the firm was alleged to have used pirated material to train Claude. Similar lawsuits by authors are ongoing against OpenAI and Microsoft. 

Professionals across the media landscape, including independent musicians, visual artists and news publishers, have over 90 pending lawsuits against a myriad of AI companies. These cases reveal a unifying protest across the creative and entertainment universes, a resistance to mounting theft and infringement from tech conglomerates. 

Tech’s transgressions against creatives have crowded out real human work and exacerbated a decline in income for writers and artists. In some cases, big tech has directly threatened jobs in creative work, spurning workers and cutting job opportunities in favor of AI implementation. 

The harm AI has caused to creative professionals is palpable across an already struggling industry. A projection from the United Nations estimates that due to AI, music creators could see a 24% decrease in revenue by 2028, while audiovisual workers could see a 21% income loss.

The losses thrust upon creatives and artists only further contribute to the growth and profitability of tech giants, who unleash seemingly limitless artificially generated content into every avenue of modern media. The creative industry continues to face increasingly turbulent challenges as the AI industry sees billions in revenue, government grants, valuations and lucrative partnerships with educational and business institutions. 

The measurable deterioration of media, the dumping of generated product into creative markets and the losses incurred by the creatives themselves is unjustifiable. AI firms and the institutions that support them maintain an unacceptable lack of accountability.

With no sign of any slowdown from big tech, this moment is imperative in deciding what happens to human art in the next era. In the face of the persistent present, we must ensure that humanity has a say in creating a future for ourselves, rather than tech moguls creating a future for and by AI.