Greg Rutkowski, a digital artist known for his surreal style, opposes AI art but his name and style have been frequently used by AI art generators without his consent. In response, Stable Diffusion removed his work from their dataset in version 2.0. However, the community has now created a tool to emulate Rutkowski’s style against his wishes using a LoRA model. While some argue this is unethical, others justify it since Rutkowski’s art has already been widely used in Stable Diffusion 1.5. The debate highlights the blurry line between innovation and infringement in the emerging field of AI art.
Training an AI doesn’t “repurpose” that work, though. The AI learns concepts from it and then the work is discarded. No copyrighted part of the work remains in the AI’s model. All that verbiage doesn’t really apply to what’s being done with the images when an AI trains on them, they are no longer being “used” for anything at all after training is done. Just like when a human artist looks at some reference images and then creates his own original work based on what he’s learned from them.