Posting My Art Should Not Mean Training AI: The Honeymoon Is Over

First, I want to acknowledge an earlier blog post I wrote that reflects the infatuation phase of my relationship with AI. At that time, this powerful tool felt like a charismatic partner. It offered fun, responsiveness, focus, collaboration, and creativity. Who wouldn’t want to go on a date with that?

I used AI for idea generation, brainstorming, and helping myself get unstuck at times. But there was always a boundary. I never used AI to produce images that I called my own, and I never will.

Recently I had an experience on Facebook that shifted my thinking. Without any prompting from me, the Meta AI assistant generated a comparison between my original artwork and what it could create in a new style. The result was clearly derived from my original painting. It was unsettling to see my work reinterpreted by a machine that I had never asked to engage with my art.

When I looked more closely into Meta’s policies, I discovered that if I post anything publicly, the company reserves the right to use that content, including images, to train its AI systems. In other words, by sharing my artwork publicly as part of promoting my work, I am automatically allowing it to become training material.

Artists are not being compensated for this training. Our work is being absorbed into these systems without pay, without explicit permission, and often without our knowledge.

For years artists used social media to share our work and build audiences, and in doing so we helped these platforms grow. Artwork captures attention and keeps people scrolling. It felt like a mutual exchange. Artists gained visibility while the platforms gained engagement and advertising revenue.

Now the relationship appears to have shifted. The same artwork that helped build these platforms is being absorbed to train AI systems without artists being asked and without artists being paid.

As an artist trying to get my work seen by the public, this leaves me in an impossible position. Social media is one of the primary ways artists share work, yet using it may also mean feeding the very systems that could replace us.

The concern extends beyond social media. I also show my work in galleries, where it is difficult to prevent visitors from taking photos. If someone photographs a painting and posts it publicly online, that image could also end up being used to train AI systems without my permission.

Because of this, I believe artists need to become involved in shaping policy around AI training. One idea would be legislation stating that artwork photographed, filmed, displayed, or shared online within the state of Washington cannot be used to train AI models without the explicit permission of the artist.

If technology companies want to build powerful AI systems, they should do it without quietly harvesting the creative work of the people who helped make their platforms successful.