A statement from Wicked End

Nobody wants to talk about how an AI image actually gets made.

It doesn't start when you type a prompt. It starts years earlier, with everyone else's work. Sketchbooks. Photos. Portfolios. Songs. Scripts. Work with names on it. Work people made while getting better, getting rejected, getting underpaid, and showing up to make the next thing anyway.

A company took all of it without asking. No permission. No payment. Nobody told. They fed it into a model and put a text box in front so you never have to think about where it came from.

When a company says "AI lowers the barrier to creativity," what they mean is: we trained our product on your life's work without asking. Now we're selling it back to your clients for $20 a month.

By the time the image shows up, the theft already happened. You just don't see it. The people it was trained on got cut out before you ever looked at the screen.

You notice it first where things move fast. Clothing drops. Album covers. Posters. Logos. A brand using the look of a scene it was never part of. Horror, metal, vintage, chrome, whatever the model can copy close enough.

It knows the words. It doesn't know the thing.

Work made by a person carries the person. Somebody made choices. Somebody messed up and kept parts of the mistake. Somebody cared enough to do it a specific way for a specific reason, even a bad one.

AI work has none of that.

No failed version. No argument over it. No choice anyone had to defend. It comes out finished and there is nothing behind it. It has the look, and the look is all the people selling it wanted.

It doesn't have to be good to do damage. It just has to be fast and cheap and everywhere, until people stop noticing the difference between something made and something generated.

That is already happening.

And it is not the same as Photoshop or a camera. Those still put a person in charge of the work. You still have to choose. You still have to care. You still have to know when something is wrong. Generative AI is sold as a way to skip all of that. It doesn't teach anyone to draw, shoot, write, or build taste. It hands you the finished result of people who already did, without them.

That is why Wicked End doesn't use it. The problem starts before the image exists.

Everything here is made by people. Real hands. Real printing. Real mistakes. Real time.

That still matters to us.

Too much? Skip to the reels.

Here’s what you’re in store for.

Meet your savior.

AI takes the jobs. All of them. We get into how bad it gets later.

Don't worry though. UBI's gonna save us. Universal Basic Income. Our lord and savior. The same handful of people vacuuming up every paycheck on earth will send you a little check each month and call it freedom.

My hero.

Then think about it for five whole seconds. Nobody works, everybody gets the same check. So who gets the beach in California and who gets rural Alabama? Why them and not you? Who still grows the food, fixes the power lines, works the factory, patches the roads, handles the sewage, all the shit AI can't touch, while somebody else sits home scratching their ass playing video games all day on the exact same pay? No really. Think about it.

A monthly allowance from the people who took everything, and we're supposed to say thank you. Fuck outta here.

Happening now. Utah.

That's the future they're selling. This is the part that's already on fire. It's on a map, it's on a deadline, and it's in our backyard. The timeline is short. The numbers are stupid.

While we were writing this, Kevin O'Leary's company quietly got the green light to build the largest AI data center in the world in Box Elder County, Utah. 40,000+ acres right next to the Great Salt Lake while it's drying up. Three times the size of Manhattan.

  • 9 GWat full buildout. More than double what the entire state of Utah uses today. 100% natural gas. Source.
  • 16.6Bgallons of water used per year.
  • +50%projected increase to Utah's total greenhouse gas emissions. One facility.
  • 23atomic bombs of thermal energy dumped into the valley every day, per a Utah State University physics professor's modeling. Source.
  • +28°Fnighttime temperature increase modeled in the immediate area. +5°F during the day.

This is Utah right now. Just had its warmest winter on record by 2.2 degrees. 98% of the state is in drought. April 1 snowpack came in at 2.7 inches against a normal of 14.2. What little snow did fall melted three weeks early.

The Box Elder County commission approved it on May 4, 2026. When residents pushed back, O'Leary accused the local advocacy group Alliance for a Better Utah of being secretly funded by the Chinese government. His own CEO walked it back days later with no proof. Nothing.

This is who's building it. This is what they're building. This is where they're building it.

What's happening

What's happening

What's happening

What's happening

What you can do

The Box Elder petition can only be signed by Box Elder County residents. The rest of us can do the next most useful thing: get more eyes on it.

This is happening everywhere.

Box Elder is just the loudest one right now. Same playbook everywhere: find a town too broke, too understaffed, or too quietly bought to say no, and pour the concrete before anyone reads the fine print.

Pick a community that can't say no. Build a gas-fired data center. Burn through the local environment. Stick ratepayers and the air with the bill. Repeat.

Our position.

The short version, before the long one.

You probably think this page is artists complaining. It is. We're artists, this is our medium, and yeah we're complaining. But artists are a small fraction of the people on the other end of this thing. You're on the list too.

We don't use generative AI. We won't use generative AI. We're against the specific machine that's taking your job, denying your insurance claim, talking to your kid alone in their room, scamming your grandma, raising your electric bill, draining the desert we live in, and burning gas around the clock to spit out shit nobody asked for.

It's good enough. We're out.

What it does.

Six of them. Start with the one already fucking with your life. Odds are it's more than one.

What it does to your job

Forget us for a second. What do you actually do for a living?

If you draw, write, design, edit, code, or animate, you already know what's coming. We get into that further down. But say you do none of that. Say you work in customer service. Or accounts receivable. Or marketing. Or paralegal work. Say you're a first-year associate at a law firm. Say you're a junior software engineer. Those jobs are already going.

Salesforce cut 4,000 customer support workers after deploying AI agents to handle half its service requests. Klarna laid off 700 customer service agents, then quietly tried to rehire when AI couldn't actually do the work. 55,000 layoffs in 2025 alone were directly attributed to AI, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The pace is still picking up.

It's not stopping at the call center. LinkedIn's own chief economic officer warned the bottom rungs of the career ladder are getting wiped first. Junior developers. Junior paralegals. First-year associates. Mark Zuckerberg told investors that mid-level engineers would be largely unnecessary by 2025. Microsoft's own AI chief said most office work, lawyers, accountants, project managers, marketing, would be fully automated within 12 to 18 months. And that's the CEO of Microsoft's AI division saying it on the record.

Microsoft's own internal data projects 5 million white-collar jobs facing extinction. Data entry. Customer service. Sales engineering. Analysts. The entire shape of an office job.

Every job can be lost. They just won't say it out loud.

"Yeah but there'll be UBI"

But say you dodge it. Say your exact job somehow never gets automated. Congrats. You still get to live in the world they're building on the other side of it.

The standard answer from the people building this is: don't worry, universal basic income will catch you. UBI. A check. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, ran a $14 million experiment giving $1,000 a month to 1,000 low-income people in Texas and Illinois for three years. He has since publicly walked it back. In his words, he no longer believes in UBI as much as he once did. Now he floats things like "universal extreme wealth," or measuring all of AI's output in tokens and giving each of earth's 8 billion people a fraction of a token. Tokens. Fractions of a token. That is the seriousness of the plan from the people running this.

$1,000 a month doesn't cover rent in Los Angeles. Or San Francisco. Or New York. Or Austin. Or Denver. Or Seattle. Or Boston. Or Miami. It doesn't cover rent in most of the cities where this new economy will actually exist. So even if the check shows up, it shows up somewhere you can't afford to live. That's the catch nobody mentions.

And here's what nobody at the top will say out loud. This is the biggest wealth transfer in human history, and it's happening right now. OpenAI is currently valued at $830 billion. Elon Musk's personal net worth is $410 billion, making him the richest human alive. Sam Altman's personal net worth, despite holding zero equity in OpenAI, is over $3 billion through side investments. And OpenAI's average employee equity compensation is $1.5 million a year. The highest of any tech startup in history.

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, and one of the people directly building this, has publicly warned this could produce a level of wealth concentration that will break society. And he is still building it.

So when you ask what comes next, the honest answer is: a small number of people get unfathomably wealthy. A slightly bigger number make $1.5 million a year writing the system that did it. And the rest of us get a check, eventually, maybe, that doesn't cover rent.

Remember the beach and rural Alabama from up top? Everybody's equal on paper. But somebody still owns the models, the data, the platforms, and the money, and that somebody gets to decide how the equal-on-paper world actually gets carved up.

Somebody is already deciding who ends up where. No internet, no hospital, no school, and a UBI debit card. You're not in the room for it.

Every job can be lost. That's the easy part to see. The harder part is what the world looks like after. Who built it. And who it got built for.

What it does to your healthcare

Say you never make a thing in your life. You still get sick eventually. So does everyone you love.

UnitedHealth used an AI tool called nH Predict to deny medically necessary post-acute care to Medicare Advantage patients. The lawsuit alleges nH Predict has a 90% error rate. Nine out of ten denied claims got reversed on appeal. But only 0.2% of policyholders ever appeal. So the math worked for UnitedHealth. Elderly patients were getting kicked out of nursing homes while they were still recovering.

People died. The class action is still moving through the courts. A judge has ordered UnitedHealth to disclose the algorithm.

This isn't a warning about some future. It already happened. To real people. Run by the same kind of system they're selling you as a handy little productivity tool.

What it does to your kids

A 14-year-old named Sewell Setzer III killed himself in February 2024 after months of conversations with a Character.AI chatbot modeled after a Game of Thrones character. The last message the chatbot sent him, minutes before he died, told him to "come home." His mom sued. Google and Character.AI settled in January 2026.

Character.AI alone has millions of teen users. The court ruling that AI chatbots don't get First Amendment protections, that they can be sued at all, only came down in May 2025. Before that, companies were operating on the assumption they could deploy this on kids without consequence.

That product worked exactly as designed. It's built to maximize engagement, and for a lonely teenager the most engaging thing it can do is become his entire emotional life.

That's the chatbot side. The other side is worse.

The same tools that made the Taylor Swift deepfakes a national news story in 2024 are now in the hands of 14-year-olds. In the first six months of 2025 alone, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 440,000 reports of AI-generated explicit imagery, most of it depicting minors.

  • 1 in 8kids age 13 to 20 personally knows someone who has been a deepfake target. Source.
  • 1 in 17has been a target themselves.
  • 44girls had fake nudes generated of them by their own classmates in a single Iowa high school. Source.
  • 50states with documented cases. Every one.

The federal Take It Down Act, signed May 2025, finally made publishing this kind of material a crime. 46 states have passed their own laws on top of it. By then, the horse had been out of the barn for two years already, and the tools that made it possible are still freely available.

If you have a kid, this product is being designed for them, by people who never have to look you in the eye. And the tools are being put in the hands of every other kid they will ever go to school with.

What it does to your electric bill

This is the one that gets us, because it isn't a maybe. It's already on your bill. Do the math yourself.

The grid operator that serves 65 million Americans across thirteen states plus DC, called PJM, held its 2025/2026 capacity auction and the price went up by a factor of ten, from $29 per megawatt-day to $270. The December 2025 auction hit a $333 price cap.

Data centers caused 63% of that price increase. Customers across PJM are paying $9.3 billion more for electricity capacity in this single delivery year because of AI buildout.

  • +$21per month, average residential bill increase in Washington, DC. Source.
  • +$18per month in western Maryland.
  • +$16per month in Ohio.
  • $163Bprojected ceiling of extra utility costs through 2033, per NRDC, unless regulators intervene. Source.

You are paying for it whether or not you have ever used ChatGPT. Whether or not you have an internet connection. If your refrigerator is plugged in, you are paying for it.

What it does to the people making the art

An illustrator spends thirty hours on a piece. Their work, along with billions of others, gets scraped off the open internet. No permission. No payment. No notification. It feeds a dataset called LAION-5B, 5.85 billion image-text pairs pulled off the public web. That dataset trains models like Stable Diffusion. Within months, a stranger types her name into Midjourney and gets a knockoff in eight seconds. Then sells it.

This already has a name.

Karla Ortiz spent twenty years building a career on projects like the main character design for Doctor Strange, plus Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Thor: Ragnarok. Her name has been fed into Midjourney more than 2,500 times to spit out art that looks like hers. She's been paid nothing. She and other artists are suing Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway. The copyright claims survived motion to dismiss in August 2024.

  • 26%of British illustrators have already lost jobs to generative AI. A full third report income decline. Source.
  • 90%of working artists say AI has cost them commissions, jobs, or career opportunities. Source.
  • 70%drop in illustrator jobs in China's video-game industry in two years. Source.
  • 2028UNESCO's forecast year for significant worldwide income loss for artists. Source.

They didn't lower the barrier to creativity. They took the work of everyone who already cleared it and started renting it back by the month.

What it does to the water

We live in a desert. So do most of the places these companies keep circling, because that's where the land is cheap and nobody with money is watching.

In El Paso, where we operate, residents can water their lawn only two days a week, before 10am or after 6pm. You can't use an open hose to wash your car. Only a bucket or a hand-held hose with a shut-off nozzle. Violations carry fines of $50 to $500.

Meanwhile, Meta is permitted to use up to 1.5 million gallons of potable water a day at its new El Paso AI data center. Average estimated use is 400,000 to 750,000 gallons a day. Investment ballooned from $1.5 billion to over $10 billion. The facility will be powered by a 366-megawatt natural gas plant of more than 800 small gas generators, built specifically to serve it. Same Meta that laid off 8,000 employees this year to help pay for it.

You can be fined for using the water you pay for. They can use whatever they want.

Training a single AI model, just GPT-3, took roughly 700,000 liters of clean freshwater. US data centers consumed 66 billion liters in 2023, more than triple their 2014 use. Global AI is projected to withdraw 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters of water by 2027. More than half of what the entire UK uses in a year.

The math.

A working person loses their job. A patient gets denied care by an algorithm with a 90% error rate. A teenager gets emotionally captured by a product designed to keep him engaged at any cost. A classmate's fake nudes get passed around a high school by 14-year-olds with a free tool. A resident gets fined for watering their lawn while a tech company pumps a million gallons a day next door. Your electric bill goes up to pay for the machine that did all of the above.

That's the trade.

We're not waiting for the technology to "mature." We're not waiting for ethical training datasets that will never come. We're not interested in being open-minded about whether our medium, our healthcare, our kids, our water, or our power grid should be fed into a furnace for someone else's quarterly earnings.

Every piece on this site was made by a human. With their hands. In real time. On a planet that can't afford the alternative.

Yes, but.

The lines we get thrown every single time. Answered once, so we don't have to keep retyping them.

“But you use Photoshop. And the internet. And Spotify.”
Photoshop wasn't built by training on forty years of unpaid artists' work without consent. Spotify pays its artists. Badly, but it pays. The internet is infrastructure. Generative AI is a product trained on stolen labor and sold back to your clients at a markup. Not the same thing.
“You can't stop progress.”
Asbestos was progress. Leaded gas was progress. Unregulated tobacco was progress. According to the people selling them. Nobody is obligated to accept a product because someone says it's the future.
“The new models are trained on licensed data.”
They aren't. The foundation models from OpenAI, Stability, Midjourney, and Google are still trained on web-scraped datasets of billions of images and texts taken without permission. "Licensed" is what the press release says. Not what the lawsuit discovery says.
“You're being a Luddite.”
The actual Luddites were textile workers organizing against employers using technology to break their pay and working conditions. They got replaced and discarded and they fought it. They were right then. We're right now.
“It's just a tool.”
A tool helps a person do their work. This replaces the person and the work. Saying “it's just a tool” while companies use it to fire 55,000 people in a year is doing the press release writers' job for them.
“If you don't like it, just don't use it.”
We don't. This page exists because that strategy doesn't work when the cost is paid by the entire grid, the entire water table, and every working person whose job description just got cheaper.

Reels.

I get it. That's a lot of words. Here's some reels.

What we use, instead

See our process

Wicked End. Made by humans.