You’ve probably played with AI image generators by this stage. Services like DALL-E and Midjourney can create extraordinary images in response to simple text prompts. They’re a ton of fun, and like many AI tools, they’re improving and evolving at a freakish rate.
They’re particularly good at imitating styles, having ingested more or less the entire history of popular art as part of their training regimes; you can freely commission your own Picassos, Van Goghs or Monets. Which to an extent is fine; these creators are long dead, having either done extremely well out of their talents while alive, like Pablo, or having died penniless like Vincent or Claude, leaving others to profit from their groundbreaking work.
Of course, there are plenty of artists who are not dead, and who are putting their life’s work into creating original works and styles. And AIs don’t discriminate; they hoover up imagery wholesale, scraping it from all over the net. The more popular the work, the more likely it is to be eaten up by an AI, ready to be digested and defecated out a thousand times with zero credit…