Really interesting news story about an artist at Dragoncon who was forcibly removed from the convention, with the cops getting called and everything, for allegedly selling AI-generated art. So even though the artist bought the table and everything, the convention threw them out. It’s unclear whether the table was refunded, but I’m guessing it probably wasn’t.
Of course, as JDA rightly points out, if you do AI well then it’s impossible for anyone to tell whether it’s AI or human, so what this really does is set the precedent that merely accusing someone of using AI in their art is sufficient to cause serious damage to someone’s business. A lot of these artists make most of their money at conventions like this, and Dragoncon is one of the top-tier sci-fi media conventions, right up there with San Diego Comic-con and FanX Salt Lake.
How long is it going to take before an artist is falsely accused of using AI and ruined because of it? Has that already happened? How many more artists are going to be thrown out of conventions like this? How many artists are going to decide that it just isn’t worth it to attend these sorts of conventions, whether or not they use AI? How long before we find that some of the artists leading these witch hunts are themselves using AI to create their art?
In the end, when AI has been normalized and no one (not even in fannish circles) blinks an eye at AI-assisted art, we’re going to look back at this time with much the same dismay that we look back at the Salem witch trials. But that may not be for another ten or twenty years. Do we really need to go through all this madness first? This is why we can’t have nice things.
