Warning: that viral AI art piece everyone is sharing has some serious stolen work in it

I kept seeing this one AI generated picture making the rounds on Twitter yesterday, the one with the neon city and the giant robot. At first I thought it was cool until I scrolled down and saw a digital artist named Claire from Portland point out the exact texture pack and brush strokes the AI copied from her DeviantArt page from 2018. The AI didn't make anything new, it just mashed up her hard work with a few other people's stuff and nobody credits them. How do we even start to fix this when the tech companies don't care about the source material?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_joseph13d agoMost Upvoted

That's a fair point about how the models work, but I think you're underestimating how close the copies can get in some cases. I've seen side by side comparisons where the AI basically traced the exact same composition and color palette from a single artist's piece, and that's way different than just learning general patterns.

west.henry13d ago

That the AI copied from her DeviantArt page" - hold on, I gotta push back on that a little. In my experience, these AI models don't actually copy individual files or brush strokes the way you're describing. They train on millions of images and learn patterns, not specific copies. I've looked into how Stable Diffusion and Midjourney work and the tech is more like a really good remix artist than a direct copier. That being said, your main point about compensation is totally fair. The bigger issue is that Claire and other artists never agreed to have their work used this way and there's no system to pay them back. The companies are definitely dragging their feet on that part. I just think we gotta be careful about exactly how we frame the technical side of it so people don't get the wrong idea about how the software actually operates.