The Brown Institute is excited to share news from our 2025-2026 bicoastal Magic Grant Croquis. The team launched recently launched a new tool as well as their official organization, the SFAI Agency, both aimed at protecting artists in the age of AI. The team is made up of Pulitzer Prize winning visual journalist and cartoonist Mark Fiore, journalist and Columbia Journalism School Audio Program Director Sally Herships, and a Stanford student and AI researcher.
Artificial Intelligence has been deemed to be one of the greatest threats to creatives of all kinds. Generative search summaries have also replaced traditional search traffic and click-through rates to news organizations are in flux. We are also in the midst of landmark copyright cases, questioning the legality of these systems and their training material.
At the same time, the mechanisms behind AI often seem like a black box to many creators. And the imbalance between tech firms and underfunded, overstretched local news outlets leaves little room for transparency and accountability.
Croquis is designed to disrupt this inequity by letting creatives of all types see inside that black box. Their technology aims to allow an artist to determine if their work has been used without permission by AI firms to train their models, providing them with the data that could prove beneficial in holding tech firms accountable.
The team is currently testing Croquis with select early adopters, including Pulitzer Prize nominated editorial cartoonist Rob Rogers. Their findings show the scale of the issue: they found that 10 datasets contained Rob’s work, 495 models trained on it, 10-15 million users have used at least one of those models, and 1-2 billion images have been generated using them.
As the SFAI Agency scales up, they hope to broker new licensing deals for how artists and creatives receive compensation in return for training private LLMs. While large and well-resourced organizations are litigating or striking licensing deals, there is no clear or affordable licensing pathway for small shops and independents. Croquis aims to fill this gap, giving creatives the choice to accept or deny the licensing of their work for payment, and putting them in the drivers’ seat with big tech.
As AI changes the landscape of journalism, the Brown Institute is proud to support initiatives that give agency to creatives and AI innovators alike.
Website: https://sfai.agency/
LI: https://www.linkedin.com/company/sfai-agency
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sfai_agency/