Like any regular human who uses Facebook, I try to be part of communities related to the things that bring me joy. In my case, these are amateur drawing communities.
I ended up inheriting a few of these communities (one of them with 79,000 members) from other admins who, for one reason or another, left social media or simply never returned to reclaim their roles. As part of a general review, one of the first rules we added—myself and the moderators and admins I work with—was: “AI-generated art is not allowed.”
That doesn’t mean I’m against using AI to generate images. On the contrary, I study these AIs and use them extensively as tools in my scientific research. But the point is: if we’re in a group dedicated to sharing drawing techniques, it makes sense to keep the theme focused on handmade art.
People generally follow this rule, and it’s rare that someone posts an AI-generated image. However, the presence of this rule also tends to attract posts from users trying to prove—without success, of course—that Generative AIs are stealing people’s art.
And that’s a claim I personally consider more of an urban legend. Perhaps it’s due to the human tendency to associate anything “intelligent” with human behavior. So some assume that image-generating AIs are just collections of stolen artworks, cut and pasted together according to some prompt, as we might do in elementary school collages—or even in the workshops of many traditional, well-known artists. The worst part is that many see this as a crime.
As Aldous Huxley would say, “Oh brave new world, that has such people in’t.”
Poor John Baldessari, who devoted his entire career to conceptual art, had over 300 solo exhibitions over nearly sixty years of work… and had to die, creating art at the age of 88, only to be delegitimized by a community of people using gadgets embedded with AI to browse social media and search engines—without having any clue how AI works or who Baldessari even was—but standing firm behind an urban myth with no factual basis.
So, to determine whether an AI can actually “steal” your work, you first need to understand how image-generating AIs work. Let me explain…
Image-generating AIs use advanced Machine Learning (ML) techniques—a field dedicated to building algorithms and models that allow computers to learn from data and make predictions or decisions without being explicitly programmed to do so. These systems identify patterns in large datasets and use them to perform specific tasks.
In other words, Generative AIs don’t cut and paste artworks from other artists. What they do is learn to recognize forms and patterns that users can describe with words—such as a ball, a circle, a human figure, an object, a certain line style, or the color pattern of a specific illustration style, for example.
Another important point: machines do not perceive images the way humans do. For a machine, an image—or even the characters in this very text—is nothing more than a sequence of numerical values. It’s all pure math. So it doesn’t make sense (even if our human brain struggles to see it that way) to claim that an AI piles up or steals art. That notion simply doesn’t apply. If anything, stealing or copying another artist’s work is a very old—and I’d argue, exclusively human—practice carried out by bad actors.
If you’re afraid AI might steal your art—rest assured, it won’t. Your line work or style won’t be copied, unless you’re such a famous artist that your name is globally known—in which case, being a reference may not be a problem, but rather a compliment.
As for the fact that AIs learn from existing works, remember: even Leonardo da Vinci learned by copying and studying references. If the great masters did it to learn, who are we—amateur artists who often spend our lives copying, or lesser-known creators unlikely to reach a Michelangelo or Caravaggio without using them as references—to complain?
In the end, I believe that basic knowledge of innovative technologies and how Generative AIs (Gen AIs) work—especially in academic and artistic institutions—could help resolve much of the fear that some artists have of the brush, just because its format has changed, ultimately limiting and imprisoning their own creativity.
