A friend in Portland said my AI art was just 'fancy theft'

We were at a gallery opening last month and I showed him a piece I generated with Midjourney. He looked at it, then at me, and said 'You didn't make that, the artists it stole from did.' That hit hard. Where do you draw the line between a new tool and taking someone's work?

4 comments

4 Comments

the_alex2mo ago

Totally get that, my cousin said the same thing about my stuff. It's a new tool, but it's learning from real artists without paying them. Feels like a gray area that needs some rules.

emma4552mo ago

Yeah, my stick figures are probably teaching AI to draw wobbly squares. We're all getting scammed.

stellat4625d ago

@the_alex You're right that it's a gray area for sure. Heard a tech reporter say on a podcast that AI companies basically treat everything online as public data to train on, which feels sketchy when it's someone's personal art style. Maybe artists need to band together and push for a licensing system or something similar.

nathan_palmer2mo ago

Know exactly what you mean. My own terrible stick figure drawings from third grade probably got scraped into some dataset, and now I'm part of the problem. Imagine an AI trying to learn perspective from a kid who couldn't draw a straight line. We're all getting ripped off, the artists and the bots.

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