Overheard a pro artist say something about AI art that stopped me cold

I was in a coffee shop last week near Portland and two digital artists were talking at the next table. One said she'd stopped posting her work on Instagram because bots were scraping her gallery for training data without asking. She showed me three of her pieces that were clearly copied in style by an AI account with 50k followers. I checked later and her originals had way less engagement than the fake versions. It made me wonder how many of us are putting our best work out there with no real protection. Have you guys found ways to watermark or lock down your portfolios without ruining how they look? I'm thinking about adding some hidden markers to my next series.

2 comments

2 Comments

gibson.sean1mo ago

Heard that and immediately went to check my own Instagram to see if any bots were copying my stuff. Turns out the only thing scraping my gallery is the algorithm itself since I haven't posted in three months. Total rookie move on my part. I started doing this thing where I drop a tiny transparent watermark in the corner of my high-res files before posting - it's small enough that people ignore it but a pain for anyone trying to train a model to ignore it completely.

beth_baker691mo ago

Man, it's like every part of life now has some invisible middleman skimming off the top.