At 11 PM on October 12th, popular illustrator AT (@haruno_intro) finished their 11-hour-long drawing live stream and uploaded the final work: a beautiful piece of fan art of Genshin Impact's Baal. At that moment, they did not know someone had stolen their draft during the stream and finished it with an AI image generator. Nor would they expect the same person would jump out and accuse them of plagiarism.
About 5 hours earlier, a Twitter user named musaish (@musaishh) uploaded a very similar designed picture of Baal on their Twitter. musaish also tweeted that they had only started learning art a week previous and that they were “gifted” with it.
A screenshot of musaish’s Twitter before it was deleted
However, people realized that musaish’s work was AI generated based on AT’s work soon after AT posted their finished piece. Many alerted AT that their work had been copied and sent kind words to encourage them.
My friend someone stole your art and used AI to finish it then posted it as their own, shame on them!!! Look at this crime they’ve committed pic.twitter.com/u1IiDLo55a
— Cappy/Kaffee (@CappySama1209) October 12, 2022
At 6 AM on October 13th, musaish commented under AT’s work stating that their work was uploaded 5-6 hours earlier than AT’s and accusing AT of using musaish’s AI image as a reference. However, considering people could see the whole 11-hour-long drawing from the records on AT’s Twitch, few, if any, people buy musaish’s word.
The screenshot of the musaish’s reply on Twitter
musaish tried to make more AI pictures based on other artists later. Their account was quickly reported and got banned by Twitter.
Though the incident did not bring much direct damage, it brought up the concern about the potential risk of the AI drawing when it falls into the wrong hands.
Some pointed out that it may have a large impact on art live streaming since anybody could take a screenshot of the draft and use AI to finish it before the original artist. In this case, fewer artists might be willing to live stream the process.
Some others have worried that some AI programs, including several quite popular ones, were using unauthorized pictures to train their model. And some generating process creates a final work that looks like a copy of the original. It leaves a high legal risk in using this kind of AI program on anything beyond a pure hobby.
A criticism of NovelAI on social media.
AI technology will keep developing, and it is difficult to determine what it will bring in the future.
Source: Twitter