# The Great AI Art Heist **Author:** Kelley Engelbrecht **Published:** 4 March 2025 **Length:** 24 mins (6,348 words) ## In Summary Kelley Engelbrecht profiles the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab and its collaboration with artists resisting the unauthorised use of their work to train generative AI. The lab developed Glaze to disrupt imitation of artistic styles and Nightshade to interfere with image-model training. Through interviews with artists and researchers, the article examines consent, livelihoods and the erosion of entry-level creative opportunities. It also questions what is lost when AI bypasses the uncertainty and experimentation through which artistic skills develop. **Source:** [https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/march-2025/the-great-ai-art-heist/](https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/march-2025/the-great-ai-art-heist/) ## What might this mean for us? For Electric Dreams, the article connects creative agency to control over training data and the conditions of artistic labour. How might Higher Education support students in understanding both AI’s technical mechanisms and artists’ capacity to contest them? Could teaching foreground the value of early experimentation and the developmental work that automated outputs might displace? ## Links in this reading - [Glaze, University of Chicago SAND Lab](https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/index.html) - [Nightshade, University of Chicago SAND Lab](https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/) - [Concept Art Association town hall on AI and artists](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u1CeiSHqwY) - [The Gap, Ira Glass](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap) - [Bracelet of Silence, New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/14/technology/alexa-jamming-bracelet-privacy-armor.html)