Meta’s AI Northern Lights Post is a Stark Reminder of Big Tech’s Contempt For Artists

Over the weekend, Meta’s official Threads account posted a series of AI-generated images of major cities with the Northern Lights overhead along with the line, “You missed the northern lights IRL, so you made your own with MetaAI.” It’s a stark reminder of the contempt Meta, and much of big tech, have for artists.

When I say contempt, I say it with an emphasis on the definition of the word that reads, “the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration [or] worthless.” It’s not that Meta doesn’t notice artists or know they exist on its platforms, it even understands that Instagram would not be what it is without them. But the leadership at Meta — and many other large tech companies — is that what artists do is of little value.

Meta’s post was met with the response you would expect from a platform that succeeds largely thanks to the artists who use it. “Utter rubbish,” “ridiculous,” “livin’ the lie,” “I’m disappointed with you,” and “this is why we hate you” are just a few of the sentiments shared in response to Meta’s post. But the social media company remains undeterred and at the time of publication, the post has not been removed. And why would Meta remove it? The company’s actions show it clearly believes that making recreations of the spectacular aurora with AI is just as good as taking a photo.

This is the same mentality that leads to celebrities simply taking a photographer’s work and posting it without permission. When people don’t foster a skill, they don’t see the effort that goes into honing it into something that people want to see and enjoy. Many simply see photography and all visual arts as a means to promote something of theirs without considering what about the work makes it so good at being the impetus for that promotion.

It’s a remarkable show of cognitive dissonance: visual art is both worthless and valueless but at the same time the best medium for promotion.

If you scrutinize generative AI as a concept for even a few minutes, this sentiment is hard not to see. It’s a technology that takes something that used to cost money and takes a little bit of time and compresses it into something that’s in many cases free and provides instant gratification. To get to that point, though, that technology first had to “learn” how to recreate these visuals by looking at what a human did first.

But big companies, celebrities, and powerful people have been stealing photos for years, so asking a computer to do it hardly feels like a change in mental direction. It’s business as usual. There is no such thing as a photo and we as users should be more concerned with how a memory made us feel than how it actually happened. There are exceptions to this mentality, but the vast majority of big tech is ready to forgo actual experiences if it means they can monetize faking it.

The irony here is that despite their obvious contempt for visual artists, these companies need it. Their models rely on it. Generative AI is not capable of creating something new, it has to base it on something. When the technology has no human-created content to work with, it ends up producing visual garbage.

Photographers are used to being undervalued and in the age of generative AI, nothing has changed except for at times, their overt disdain slips out from behind their mask.