Sabrina Lin
Bio
Sabrina is a user experience practitioner passionate about design justice and ethical innovation.
She leads design initiatives to solve complex problems in the Human Capital Management space at Oracle. Previously, she worked at the intersection of human-centered research, strategy, and design, launching products with MIT-based early-stage startups. Beyond her professional work, Sabrina is an artist and organizer who has raised thousands of dollars in aid for displaced families and community organizations. She is now excited to focus on developing solutions that protect artists from exploitative AI art tools, promoting a more equitable technology landscape.
Sabrina graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in Media Arts and Sciences.
Fellowship Project
As generative AI art tools rapidly transform creative industries and normalize unregulated technological malpractice, artists are left to navigate complex shifts in the value of artistic labor, copyright concerns, and identity. These tools rely on the mass crowdsourcing of imagery to achieve style transfer, replicating living artists’ data and styles at an unprecedented scale. Without meaningful human intervention and application of fair use principles, these AI art tools simulate novelty while displacing the work of artists across all creative markets.
While efforts from Concept Art Association, the Human Artistry Campaign, and art guilds across the United States have challenged these developments through collective action and legislative lobbying, policy change happens slowly. Meanwhile, tools like MidJourney and DALL·E continue to train on scraped artwork posted in online spaces without artists’ consent, compensation, or credit. From corporate workflows to artist studios, change is rapid and susceptible to current AI narratives that prioritize techno-utopian visions. This project is not anti-genAI nor technophobic, rather we are focusing on exploring a path where the technology that is built off artists’ labor is not pushing the very same people out of the market and severing the pipelines of future generations of emerging artists that contribute to humanity’s cultural innovation.
Small changes can lead to larger ones. It can start with documenting how independent and emerging artists — whose voices have been underrepresented in ongoing advocacy efforts — can reclaim narrative power around ethical standards, reimagine human-machine entanglement, and benefit from increased education and community in this space. There is a pressing need to raise urgent questions about the impact of these tools and its ramifications through our capitalist system that justifies harm in the name of optimized innovation. We must chart a future in which technology serves culture — not the other way around.
This research initiative analyzes the impact of generative AI art tools on independent and emerging artists’ livelihoods and practices, while also examining how these tools are embedded within broader systems of exploitative platform power, uncontrolled data scraping practices, and aesthetic commodification. Centering the lived experiences, imaginations, and values of independent and emerging artists, this project explores both the anxieties and aspirations that AI image generation tools provoke within local artistic communities.
This project aims to co-create an educational toolkit that directly addresses the concerns raised by AI skeptics while incorporating insights embraced by AI enthusiasts. Informed by over 50 interviews with independent and emerging art practitioners, the toolkit will serve as both a pedagogical resource and a platform for critical inquiry to help artists assess and reshape their relationships with AI. Key stakeholders in this information sharing and collaboration are the Graphic Arts Guild, California College of the Arts, and larger Stanford community.
Building on this foundation, this project will host a series of workshops that serve as a starting point for community-driven dialogue and the co-creation of shared principles, ultimately informing the development of community guidelines for several partner arts organizations in the Bay Area. By equipping artists and their communities with shared language, technical education, and frameworks, this project seeks to bridge theory and practice, contributing to a more ethical, imaginative, and artist-centered future for AI in the arts.