Adapt or Die? Adapt and Rise.
Why I’m fighting back against exploitative generative AI
By May of 2022, over 50 of my paintings had been scraped from across the internet for LAION 5B, an AI training dataset consisting of over 5 billion image and text pairings. I wouldn’t find out for many months the extent by which my work was used, but within a couple months, I learned that my name was a popular prompt for users of text-to-image generating software. Since LAION 5B was open source and non-profit and companies like Midjourney and Stability AI felt the dataset was “fair use,” my name was suddenly popping up in tandem with images I didn’t make, but certainly echoed my style.
At first I was fascinated, excited even. I discovered my name in a database of artists whose names summoned an algorithm built to predict their stylistic choices. In a list of around 400 artists - including the old masters in alphabetical order mixed in with living legends and my artistic peers - finding my name in there was surreal. I had a million questions, so I spent the summer researching what this meant.
I knew AI assisted art was right around the corner. I pictured, one day, being able to create a dataset of my own artwork and remixing that work to get new ideas, new perspectives, new color palettes perhaps. I was astounded to learn that not only was this possible, it had already been done without my consent and that literally anyone could access this algorithm by typing my name.
Grotesque and dreamlike portraits of waifish women with swirling hair, generated by using my name as a prompt, popped up in every AI image search I could find. Every time someone chose to invoke my name, they were violating my artwork and by extension, my corporeal self too.
Who knew an algorithm could be so intimate? It threaded the patterns found in the decade of my art that was online, it scoured my sketchbooks, my unfinished and abandoned scribbles, the afterimages of my dreams imprinted in my mind, it read the notes in the margins of my journals, it studied the fragmented memories I hid in my work and its crudeness was stark, yet violently illuminating.
I’ll never forget the wave of nausea that overtook me once I learned I could finally search the database to find out which of my works had been unwittingly sacrificed for the “greater good.” It took days to decide whether I even wanted to have this information. I knew that it would be painful and that it might irrevocably change my relationship to those pieces. Eventually, morbid curiosity got to me, so I searched my name at haveIbeentrained.com. My breath left my body as I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled.
I closed the page after a few seconds of horror. There had to be more than 20, but I stopped counting after about a minute on the page because it was excruciating. Every one of those paintings, each one a part of my soul and evidence of my vulnerable existence, was scraped. Stripped of soul, intention, experience, mystery, humanity.
When I create a painting, it carries everything I am and ever have been in those moments of creation. Each one is a time stamp, a self portrait, a vessel. Some pieces are deeply meaningful, created for no purpose other than to express complicated emotions that words, song, or dance couldn’t convey. I share most of my art online freely, with the purpose of connection through expression and vulnerability. I trust that when I share my work with the world, it’s received in good faith, as all art is shared.
I never, ever in my wildest dystopian fantasies imagined that sharing my art online for over a decade would one day result in a soulless algorithm built not just on the theft of my life’s work but also my name. It never occurred to me that a violation of this extreme could be possible.
After I learned the extent by which my work was used by these programs and the tens of thousands of times my name has been summoned for a cheap gimmick, I fell into despair. I stopped creating for months. My life fell apart, I left a long term relationship, started over as a single mom, and I began looking for a “regular” job after 10 years as a full time artist. It felt like the final nail in the proverbial coffin.
Then, at the end of 2022, after 6 months of watching the blaze of generative AI rip through my community and my peers, I was offered the opportunity to fight back via a class action lawsuit of artists against AI image generators who were so egregiously profiting off our unpaid labor without credit, consent, or compensation. My life hasn’t been the same since.
In the many months since our historic lawsuit was filed, I’ve worked hard to become one of the loudest voices among all the creatives who are fighting for accountability and regulation in generative AI. I’ve been in The New York Times, covered by the Associated Press, the New Yorker, NPR (twice), and even in Time magazine where I was named in the 2023 last of 100 people shaping the future of AI. My goal has been to spread awareness about how GAI is unethically made, how artists are losing paying work to GAI, and other, immediate consequences of this tech on real people, just like me.
While this has given me much needed purpose and direction in a time of great uncertainty, it has also profoundly affected my life and likely, my future too. In the wake of this development, I’ve also watched my income remain stagnant while the cost of living has risen beyond my means and life-sustaining gigs have all but dried up. I’ve turned to my first part time job in 10 years to help make ends meet as an adjunct illustration professor. Working directly with the next generation of artists and illustrators inspires me to stay focused on passing on my knowledge, but also make sure they even have careers to work toward.
I’m not sure what the future holds, but I’m fighting for a more equitable one, whether it’s through the lawsuit, bringing awareness to this issue, or through the art I create in response. I realize that, unless the datasets are disgorged, there is no “unlearning” the over 50 works of mine that were scraped. I may see no reconciliation at all and it may take years for meaningful regulation and protections for creatives against exploitative AI.
It would be easy to succumb to feeling disempowered, but I refuse to “adapt or die,” as pro-AI folks love to tell me. So, to take back the narrative of my life’s work, I’m embarking on a personal project. I want to give light to every painting that was scraped.
Irresponsible tech companies want to minimize my unwitting contribution to the datasets and tell me I don’t deserve compensation. Out of billions of images, why should my artwork receive any attention, why should my name matter at all? I will share the stories behind those pieces, their context in my life thus far, and why each and every one of them matters.
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Thank you for reading. Now go make something with your hands!