AI can’t get enough of this fantasy artist

Polish illustrator Greg Rutkowski’s work has appeared in games like “Horizon Forbidden West” and “Dungeons & Dragons.”

He’s also a popular prompt for AI image generator Stable Diffusion, per MIT Technology Review.

His name has been used as a prompt 93k+ times, per Lexica, a website that tracks prompts. To put this in context, we searched for “cat” — the internet’s favorite creature — and only got 16.8k images back.

The problem

AI generators train on existing images without permission or attribution, leading Getty Images to ban AI-generated imagery on its platform in fear of future copyright issues.

For artists, they’re a risk to their livelihoods.

Rutkowski doesn’t appreciate the deluge of images now falsely credited to him on the internet, telling Yahoo Finance he worries AI art could dilute human creativity and threaten art education.

This isn’t the only recent AI art controversy

• A graphic novelist who used Midjourney to illustrate her story secured the first copyright for an AI-generated work. The issue? The main character looks like “Euphoria” actress Zendaya.
• The winner of an art competition used AI to make his prize-winning piece, spurring debate over whether that’s fair.

And we expect more AI controversies to come.