The intersection of AI with existing industries continues to create real friction that will probably eventually end in a significant legal ruling, but one area at the forefront is visual art. Last year, an artist intentionally cheated the rules when entering a competition and won with an AI-generated image. The world's most prestigious photography awards were also successfully panned by photographers who wanted to show the dangers. Now a popular fantasy artist claims that his work is being copied so much that the originals are being buried, negatively affecting his career.

Greg Rutkowski is a digital artist who has had a long and successful career, working for companies and brands such as Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Ubisoft, Disney, Games Workshop, and Blizzard. Even if you don't know his name, you've probably seen his work somewhere. It's everywhere on the web, which of course means it's been scrapped to hell and back by all the AI art bots.

Rutkowski claims that since September 2022, his name has been used over 400,000 times as a prompt for AI art bots, more times than artists Pablo Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci. He does not consent to AI's use of his (copyrighted) work.

"The first month I discovered this, I realized that it would clearly affect my career and that I would not be able to recognize or find my work on the Internet," Rutkowski told the BBC. 'The results will be associated with my name, but it's not my image. It is not my work. So it will be confusing to people who discover my work."

The artist said that his and others' work has been "taken away so easily by AI" and worries that AI will render human artists "obsolete."

It is not hard to see why Rutkowski's fantastic work has become so popular among users of AI software. Rutkowski told Creative Bloq, "Unfortunately, I've become like a meme."

Even stranger, some people have begun to produce work in Rutkowski's style and sign themselves as artists. Worse, Rutkowski's popularity resulted in his name becoming the "default prompt" on some artbots.

Whether the expression "copied" is appropriate in this context is another question, and the artist's predicament demonstrates the urgent need for regulation in this area. This could not be a clearer example of an active artist whose career is about to be negatively impacted by an AI scraping their work without their consent. You don't have to be a lawyer to realize that something is deeply wrong.

Some companies seek to get ahead of the inevitable litigation: Adobe Firefly is a so-called ethical AI generator that allows artists to refuse to have their work used for AI training. But the balance still feels wrong. Rutkowski hopes that some of these companies can be persuaded to reset their models to "forget" about previously scraped copyrighted works. We asked the artists if they intend to seek some kind of legal remedy in the future.

"It's horrible," he said. And what's frightening is that it's really hard to see our own future."