Molly Crabapple

Molly Crabapple (born 1983) is a New York artist and writer whose ink-splattered drawings have documented Occupy Wall Street, Guantánamo Bay, and the Syrian war. She is the author of the memoir Drawing Blood and co-author of Brothers of the Gun with Syrian journalist Marwan Hisham, and her work sits in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.

The open letter against AI illustration

In May 2023, Crabapple and the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting published an open letter urging news publishers to restrict the use of generative AI illustration in journalism. The letter — which Artnet reported gathered over a thousand signatories, including Naomi Klein and Michael Chabon, and denounced AI-generated images as “vampirical” — argued that image generators were built on the scraped, uncredited work of the very illustrators they threaten to replace, and that generative tools “can churn out polished, detailed simulacra of what previously would have been illustrations drawn by the human hand.”

Promoting the letter, Crabapple wrote that AI art corporations were “poised to destroy illustrators’ livelihoods, and they’re using illustrators’ own stolen images to do it,” urging supporters to “stand up for Team Human.” Within weeks the petition passed 1,400 signatures, and Crabapple became one of the media world’s most quotable opponents of AI imagery — arguing the fight is less about technology than about labor and theft.

Unlike the courtroom battles led by Karla Ortiz and the Stability plaintiffs, Crabapple’s campaign targets demand rather than supply: if publishers refuse machine-made art, the market for scraping artists dries up. Critics counter that such pledges are unenforceable and that editorial budgets, not petitions, will decide the outcome.