Popular fantasy artist claims AI has ripped him off more than Picasso and da Vinci, and his own work is getting buried by the copies
The intersection of AI and existing industries continues to create real friction, which will probably ultimately end in significant legal rulings, and one of the fields at the forefront is visual art. Last year one artist deliberately fudged the rules when entering a competition and won it with an AI-created image, while the world's premiere photography awards were also successfully punked by a photographer who wished to show the dangers. Now a popular fantasy artist is claiming that his work has been copied so much that it's actually burying his originals and harming his career.
Greg Rutkowski is a digital artist who's had a long and successful career working for companies and brands that include Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Ubisoft, Disney, Games Workshop, and Blizzard. You may not know his name, but you've almost definitely seen this guy's work somewhere. It is all over the web and, of course, that means it's been scraped to hell and back by all these AI artbots.
Rutkowski claims that his name has been used as a prompt for AI artbots more than 400,000 times since September 2022, more times than the artists Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci. He has not consented to any use of his (copyrighted) work by AI.
«The first month that I discovered it, I realised that it will clearly affect my career and I won't be able to recognise and find my own works on the internet,» Rutkowski told the BBC. «The results will be associated with my name, but it won't be my image. It won't be created by me. So it will add confusion for people who are discovering my works.»
The artist says that his and others' work «has been taken from us so easily with AI» and worries about it making human artists «obsolete», adding that «my
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