The arts are an essential industry.
We need artists as much as we need accountants.
We need dancers as much as we need doctors.
We need comedians as much as we need civil engineers.
We need filmmakers as much as we need financial planners.
We need musicians as much as we need ministers.
In every culture that has ever existed, art has been there. Not as decoration. Not as entertainment. But as a central universal human expression reflecting values, beliefs, and our daily lives and dreams. Early humans didn’t paint their caves beige, they told stories on their walls with paintings. It was their Netflix. They came home after a big hunt, watched cave art and chilled.
The creative arts is how we make sense of the world. It’s long-form critique. It’s esoteric. It’s ephemeral. It touches a wordless space inside us. It moves our body. It makes us laugh. It makes us cry. It makes us angry and uncomfortable. It exposes our vulnerability. It rages against the machine. It says the unsayable. It’s beautiful at some times, and at others it’s dangerous. It asks us to reflect. It asks us to tolerate different ideas. Art has no algorithm. It doesn’t farm us into channels of consumers, ready for ideological slaughter. It treats us with respect. It invites us to the table and then asks us, is this even a table? Art makes us think. Art connects us. It’s our HI – human intelligence. And it’s our only protection against the monster that is AI.
Stop using AI to make your artwork. It’s repellent. Every time I see a poster made by AI it tells me the event is inauthentic and lazy. It’s creepy lack of creativity hollows out the human experience. It literally makes my skin crawl. Every poster you make with AI steals from the future of an artist not yet born. And all that have ever existed. AI is a digital thief. Right now, AI art scraping is harvesting artwork on the web and using it to train generative intelligence models.
That means the dance company who put up videos of their latest show, artists who have websites to display their work, writers, makers, musicians and comedians – we are all having our work stolen and digitally defaced without creator content or payment. The capitalist extractors have taken the oil from the planet, and now they extract our human oil. The secret to what makes us human, to our complexity, to our loneliness, our longing, our lives; well it lives in our art. It is the essence of us. And they are sucking it from our marrow. And those supposed to protect us, well they are just letting this happen.
And right now, AI is stealing Indigenous Australian art. In a story in The Guardian this week they expose how Big Tech is digitally colonising cultural knowledge. Then selling it on Temu. Like a stolen car with a sloppy paint job, art is slightly changed, or altered, creating a kind of confusion and misinformation, removing artist’s hands and hearts. Consent doesn’t exist. This isn’t just scraping. This is Big Tech’s invisible hands touching us. This is cultural raping.
And artists can’t say ‘no’. There is no place for consent. If your work is on a platform, anywhere in the digital space, you are at risk.
We need our artists. And AI knows this. It’s no coincidence that they’re stealing our universal language and making it theirs. Creatives are our frontline in protecting everything that is unique about us. We must stop Big Tech from stealing our human hearts.
Make art. House artists. Support and respect the important work they do.
And stop the monster scraping us.
Mandy Nolan’s column has appeared in The Echo for almost 25 years. She is a writer, comedian and artist, is the preselected Greens candidate for Ballina and was the Greens candidate at the past two federal elections.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
