When AI image generators burst into our lives last summer, what initially looked to many like a promising creative tool soon revealed itself to be problematic. Artists were shocked to find that their names were being used as prompts to churn out pastiche works that closely mimic their distinctive styles, sometimes even carrying garbled versions of their own signatures.
Even when AI-generated images don’t closely resemble any one artist’s work, many also find it galling that their images have been used as training data without their consent to create a product that may threaten their livelihoods.
Illustrator describes the moment they first encountered AI art in their style. “The experience of seeing someone toss my work into Stable Diffusion and make a model off it was nothing short of devastating,” they say. “An artist’s voice is a lifetime development that is an amalgam of their visual vocabulary, interpretations
