My daughter showed me an AI image that copied her original painting almost exactly

She spent 3 weeks on a watercolor of a fox in the woods for her college portfolio. Then she found an AI generator output that had the exact same pose, same lighting, same leaf pattern in the background. The prompt used her name as a style reference. She was in tears. I told her maybe she should watermark everything from now on but she said that won't stop people from scraping her work. Is there any real way to protect your art from this or do we just accept that anything online is fair game for training data?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_alex3d ago

dude my friend had the same thing happen with her digital paintings

simon_carr3d ago

oh man, that hits hard... i had the exact same thing with a big writing project i was working on. i was like 200 pages into this novel i was writing for fun, just typing away on my laptop for months. then one day the file just corrupted, wouldn't open, nothing. tried every recovery tool i could find online and nothing worked. still hurts to think about it honestly...

olivia_white933d ago

the_alex, your friend's situation is exactly what happened with my cousin and her photography. She had a whole series of landscape shots she edited for months, then one day her hard drive just died. No backup. Thousands of hours gone like that. She's still not over it. Keeps a printed photo album now just in case.