Art vandalism happens. The reasons vary: Some offenders get a thrill out of anonymous destruction, or they want to take an artist’s creations down a notch. Others just dislike the art on display. But sometimes art vandals are trying to make an impassioned point. That was the case at Champlain College in Burlington over the holiday break. In the student-run Stair Nook Gallery, senior Jaime Klingsberg, a creative media major, had installed his final project for a class last semester on professional practices: a projection slide show of 30 images of landscapes he had created using AI technology that he had modified. Over break, Klingsberg got an email from his professors and the Champlain College Art Gallery director and curator, Wylie Garcia: Someone had stolen the thumb drive from the projector and written “AI” in a circle with a slash through it in black marker on the wall where the images had been projected. A smaller message below it read “AI IS THEFT!” Klingsberg’s artwork was part of the class’ larger exhibition, called “Unconscious Imagination,” the rest of which was upstairs in the main gallery. To his knowledge, Klingsberg’s work was the only one on display that used AI. Before the new semester began, staff painted over the vandalism and reinstalled the work as a laptop slide show in the main gallery. The issue of AI and art has recently seized widespread attention with the availability of open-source text-to-image generators — such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney — that allow users to instantly create images from text prompts. These generators are trained on millions of text-image pairs drawn from the internet, many from art created by hand but stripped of attribution. Klingsberg used Stable Diffusion, he said, installing it in a way that “gave me more freedom to tweak the settings and … some of the ways it reacts to the prompts.” Klingsberg, who also draws, paints and composes electronic music, said that he was “not totally surprised” at the vandalism. “Especially recently, I’ve seen a lot of news about people being upset about AI art. A lot of it [is] from artists. I sympathize with artists’ [claims that] people using AI are able to take other people’s ideas. But I think people do that with or without AI,” he said. In an opinion piece defending AI art that he wrote but has yet to find…