The Human-Made Art Society

painted live on stage in Botswana to the live performance of New Moon Ensemble

The EU AI Act is now enforceable, and for the first time, artists have actual legal tools to protect their work from being scraped into AI training datasets. This isn't a symbolic victory. This is leverage. And if you're not using it, you're leaving protection on the table.

What the Law Actually Says

Starting this year, AI companies operating in EU markets must check whether a data source has a copyright reservation before using it in training. They must publish public summaries of what datasets they used. They must label AI-generated content. And if they don't comply? Penalties up to €10 million or 2% of annual turnover. That's not a slap on the wrist. That's real money.

Under the EU Copyright Directive, you can now reserve your rights and explicitly prevent your work from being used in AI training. Companies are legally required to honor that reservation. The gray area of "we scraped it from the web, so it's fair game" is closing, at least in Europe.

The Problem: They're Still Ignoring You

Here's what's actually happening. Artists are sending opt-out letters. They're emailing AI companies directly. They're doing everything right. And they're getting nothing back. No response. No acknowledgment. Companies are betting that individual artists won't have the resources to enforce their rights.

Sound familiar? It's the same playbook tech platforms have run for years. Move fast, scrape everything, and deal with the legal consequences later, if they come at all. The difference now is that the law is on your side. The question is whether you'll make them feel it.

What You Can Actually Do

First, add a machine-readable copyright reservation to your website. The EU's text and data mining rules require AI developers to check for this before scraping. A robots.txt directive isn't enough on its own, but combined with explicit rights reservations in your terms or metadata, you're building a paper trail.

Second, document everything. If you've sent opt-out requests and been ignored, keep records. When enforcement actions ramp up, and they will, those receipts matter.

Third, join forces. Individual artists get ignored. Organized groups get lawyers. The creative unions, artist collectives, and advocacy organizations pushing for enforcement need numbers behind them. Your voice adds weight.

The EU didn't give artists these tools because it was easy or inevitable. It happened because creators pushed for it. Now the work is making sure those tools actually get used.

Have you tried opting out of AI training? What happened when you did?

On December 31, 2022, cartoonist Sarah Andersen published an op-ed in The New York Times that would become one of the most cited pieces in the fight for artist rights. The essay was titled "The Alt-Right Manipulated My Comic. Then A.I. Claimed It." In it, she described what happened when she typed her own name into Stable Diffusion and watched the machine spit out images in her style. Images she never made. Characters she never drew. Work that looked like hers but wasn't.

Her assessment: "I see a monster forming."

The Quote, In Full Context

Sarah Andersen is the creator of "Sarah's Scribbles," a comic series read by tens of millions. She's not a critic on the sidelines. She's a working artist whose livelihood depends on the recognizability of her voice. When AI scraped her work and made it replicable on demand, she didn't stay quiet. She wrote. She named the problem. And then she did something else.

On January 13, 2023, just two weeks after the op-ed published, Andersen became one of the lead plaintiffs in Andersen v. Stability AI, a class action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. The case alleged that these companies trained their models on billions of images scraped from the internet, including the copyrighted work of artists who never consented. It's one of the most significant legal challenges to generative AI in the art world.

What's Changed Since 2022

Three and a half years later, the monster she saw forming is no longer forming. It's here. AI image generators are faster, more accessible, and more integrated into platforms than they were when Andersen first wrote that line. But so is the resistance.

The lawsuit survived. In August 2025, U.S. District Judge William Orrick denied Stability AI's motion to dismiss the copyright infringement claims. The case is now in discovery, with a trial scheduled for September 2026. A third amended complaint was filed in February, and the legal ground has shifted in ways no one could have predicted when Andersen first went public.

And beyond the courtroom, something else happened. Artists started organizing. Communities like this one formed. The phrase "human made" became more than a preference. It became a stance.

Why This Matters to You

Andersen didn't just describe a problem. She named it early, clearly, and in a venue where millions would read it. That takes courage. It also takes a kind of clarity that only comes from lived experience. She knew what it felt like to see her work used without permission. She knew what it meant when a machine could replicate her voice faster than she could draw.

Her words in 2022 gave language to a feeling that thousands of artists were just starting to have. And her lawsuit gave them a legal front to watch.

The monster she saw forming? It's still here. But so are we.

Your Turn

What's the line from a creator, artist, or writer that crystallized your own stance on AI in art? Drop it in the comments. Let's build a library of the words that mattered.

I've tried adding the email snippet that's supposed to render the check mark in my email signature but (as I suspected) all that does is add the code itself to my signature block. I use Gmail - what's the trick? How do I get it to work right in my Gmail Signature? Thanks for any help anyone!

How do you respond to comments such as “How long did this one take you to make?”

In July 2023, a concept artist who helped build the visual worlds of Doctor Strange, Black Panther, Loki, and Star Wars sat before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and said something that every working artist could have said: "I have never been asked. I have never been credited. I have never been compensated one penny." That artist was Karla Ortiz. And nearly three years later, nothing has changed.

The Testimony

On July 12, 2023, Karla Ortiz appeared before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property during a hearing titled "Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – Part II: Copyright." Her written testimony is a matter of public record. She explained how generative AI companies scraped her portfolio, along with billions of other images, to train systems that now compete directly with the artists they took from. No permission. No attribution. No payment.

This wasn't hypothetical. Ortiz is one of three named plaintiffs in Andersen v. Stability AI, the landmark lawsuit filed in January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt. She put her name on the case and her face in front of the Senate because she believed the truth needed to be said out loud, on the record, where it could not be ignored.

What's Happened Since

In August 2024, Judge William Orrick denied motions to dismiss key claims in Andersen v. Stability AI, ruling that both direct and induced copyright infringement claims were plausible. The case moved into discovery. Trial is now set for September 8, 2026, just four months from today.

Three years of filings. Three years of legal process. And still, not a single artist whose work was scraped into the LAION dataset of 5 billion images has been asked, credited, or paid. The companies that used that data are valued in billions. The artists whose work made it possible are still waiting for an answer.

This is the world we live in: a concept artist whose brushwork shaped some of the most recognized films of the last decade had to fly to Washington, D.C., sit in front of a Senate subcommittee, and explain that she was never asked. That her work was taken. That she has not seen a penny.

Why This Matters to You

If you're reading this in the Human-Made Art Society, you already know. You've felt some version of this in your own work, your own feed, your own market. The devaluation. The "why should I pay an artist when I can type a prompt" conversations. The unsettling sense that something was taken from all of us, collectively, without our consent.

Ortiz's testimony wasn't just about her. It was about the principle. And the trial this September will not just determine her case. It will shape the legal landscape for every artist whose work exists online.

We built ArtHelper to stand with artists who make things with their hands, their eyes, their lived experience. Not scraped from them. Not imitated without permission. Made by them.

Karla Ortiz told the truth in 2023. The trial is finally coming. And the question that matters now is whether the answer will change.

I'd like to hear from you: What was the moment, the quote, or the story that crystallized your own stance on AI and your work as an artist?

Fourteen years ago, before any of us had heard of DALL-E or Midjourney, one of the most consequential painters of our generation made a prediction. She was right. And what she said matters more now than it did then.

The Quote, and Where It Came From

In June 2012, journalist Rachel Cooke interviewed Jenny Saville for The Guardian. Saville had just opened her first major UK solo show at Modern Art Oxford, and two of her monumental paintings were on view in the Ashmolean’s Italian Renaissance room alongside Bellini and Titian.

Cooke asked whether painting could survive in a world increasingly shaped by algorithms. Saville didn’t hedge:

“Art reflects life, and our lives are full of algorithms, so a lot of people are going to want to make art that’s like an algorithm. But my language is painting, and painting is the opposite of that.”

The full interview is still online at The Guardian.

What’s Changed Since She Said It

In 2012, the algorithm Saville was describing was abstract. It was recommendation engines, ad targeting, social feeds optimizing for engagement. The idea of an algorithm generating paintings didn’t yet exist in any serious form.

That changed. Midjourney launched in 2022. DALL-E went public months later. Stable Diffusion flooded the open web. By 2024, billions of AI-generated images had been uploaded to social platforms. The algorithm she anticipated is no longer an abstraction. It’s here, generating a thousand images a minute, flooding every feed you scroll through.

And yet her sentence still stands: painting is the opposite of that.

The opposite hasn’t changed. What the algorithm does has simply made the opposite clearer. A painter’s choices, mistakes, revisions, and the hours of lived attention that go into every mark are the very things the algorithm cannot replicate. It can approximate the output. It cannot approximate the process.

Why This Matters in Your Feed

Every artist in this community knows what it feels like to scroll past AI-generated images and feel a flicker of something. Doubt. Frustration. Sometimes anger. Sometimes the quieter question: does what I make still matter when machines can produce something that looks similar in seconds?

Saville answered that question before the machines arrived. Painting, photography, sculpture, illustration, whatever your medium, the work you make carries your attention, your time, your choices. That’s what “the opposite of an algorithm” means. Not a style. Not a technique. The fact that a person showed up and made the work.

The flood doesn’t change that. If anything, it proves it.

Join the Discussion

What’s a line from a painter, photographer, sculptor, or filmmaker that crystallized your own stance on AI-generated images? I’m curious whether there’s a quote that stuck with you the way Saville’s stuck with me.

Spotify announced something two weeks ago that didn't get nearly enough attention. Starting now, artists can earn a "Verified by Spotify" badge, a green checkmark that tells listeners: this is a real human being making this music. And here's the part that matters most: AI-generated artists are explicitly ineligible. The company said it plainly: profiles that "primarily represent AI-generated or AI-persona artists are not eligible for verification."

This is not a small policy tweak. This is a major platform choosing a side.

The Numbers Are Staggering

Let's talk about why this matters. Spotify removed 75 million "spammy tracks" from its platform over the past year. Seventy-five million. And here's the number that should keep you up at night: Deezer, a rival streaming platform, now receives nearly 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks every single day. That's 44% of their daily uploads.

The flood is real. It's not theoretical. It's not coming in five years. It's already here, and it's drowning out human creators in the algorithmic noise. Spotify looked at that flood and decided to give human artists a way to stand out.

Why This Matters Beyond Music

Spotify's move signals something bigger than streaming policy. They're saying out loud what collectors, galleries, and audiences have always known intuitively: the human behind the work is part of the value. You can't separate the art from the artist.

Their verification criteria tell the whole story. To earn the badge, you need evidence of real-world activity. Concert dates. Merchandise. Social media presence. A sustained relationship with actual fans over time. In other words, you need to be a person living a creative life, not an algorithm optimizing for background noise.

The company stated it directly: "In the AI era, it's more important than ever to be able to trust the authenticity of the music you listen to." That's a platform with 600 million users acknowledging that authenticity has value. That human origin matters to the people listening.

What This Means for Visual Artists

Music is just the first battleground. Every platform that hosts creative work will eventually face this same question: do we distinguish human creators, or do we let the flood of generated content wash everything into sameness?

The answer matters for you. Whether you sell originals, license prints, or build an audience for commissions, your humanity is your competitive advantage. Not because AI can't mimic your style, but because collectors are buying more than an image. They're buying a story. A relationship. A piece of someone's actual life.

Spotify just made that distinction visible with a green checkmark. The question now is whether the platforms that matter to visual artists will do the same.

What do you think? Should Instagram, Etsy, or online galleries create their own "human verified" badges? Would you want one?

In September 2023, one of the most trusted photographers alive was asked a simple question: how does AI affect you?

Wolfgang Tillmans, the German photographer who won the Turner Prize in 2000, whose images of ordinary life have shaped how we see the world for 35 years, didn't soften the answer. He called it "visual obliteration."

The quote, in full

The interview was published by Dazed Digital on September 25, 2023, during the opening of "Fold Me," his solo exhibition at David Zwirner in New York. The interviewer asked Tillmans how the seismic shift toward AI generated imagery affects him as a lens based artist who never manipulates his photographs, one whose entire body of work depends on audience trust.

His answer: "There will be subcultures and countercultures that hold onto their senses, but maybe things are quite far evolved in a downward spiral of visual obliteration."

Not disruption. Not evolution. Obliteration. The erasure of the seen world, replaced by images that required no human eye to make.

What's changed since then

Twenty months have passed. In that time, the spiral has accelerated exactly the way Tillmans described.

When he gave that interview, Midjourney v5 was still novel. DALL-E 3 hadn't launched yet. Sora didn't exist. The major class action lawsuits, Andersen v. Stability AI, Getty v. Stability, were still working their way through early filings. Most platforms had no labeling policy for generated images. Most feeds looked mostly real.

Now? Your feed is a guessing game. Platforms are scrambling to build labeling requirements that users largely ignore. The legal cases have multiplied and sprawled across music, visual art, journalism. And every week brings another viral image that stops conversation, then turns out to be generated, another small erosion of trust in the visual record.

Tillmans saw it coming. He called it by name.

Why this matters here

When someone who spent three decades building an eye the world trusts tells you we're in a downward spiral, you don't dismiss it as nostalgia. You ask what he's seeing that you're not.

The subcultures and countercultures he mentioned, the ones "holding onto their senses," are not hypothetical. They're us. They're you, reading this, making work with your own eyes and hands and hours. They're every artist in this community who decided that being human made is a statement worth making, not just a default.

Tillmans wasn't predicting a future. He was describing a present most people hadn't named yet. Now you can see it in your own feed every day.

That's what makes this community different. We're not pretending the spiral isn't happening. We're choosing to stand outside it. We're the subculture he believed would hold on.

A question for the thread

Tillmans said it in 2023. Miyazaki called AI animation "an insult to life itself" in 2016. Del Toro said "the soul of art is human" in 2022.

What's the line from a photographer, painter, or filmmaker that crystallized your own view on AI in art? Drop it in the comments. I want to build a library of these voices.

Last week, five major publishers and bestselling author Scott Turow filed a lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally. The allegation? That Zuckerberg himself authorized Meta to torrent hundreds of millions of pirated books to train their AI. If you've ever wondered whether Big Tech actually respects your creative work, here's your answer.

The Scale of the Theft

According to the lawsuit, Meta downloaded over 267 terabytes of pirated material from sites like LibGen. That's many times the size of the entire print collection of the Library of Congress. Hundreds of millions of books, articles, and publications, all torrented from pirate websites that Meta's own employees acknowledged were illegal. The plaintiffs called this "one of the most massive infringements of copyrighted materials in history." That's not hyperbole. That's the complaint.

They Knew Exactly What They Were Doing

This wasn't an accident or oversight. In December 2023, Meta employees circulated an internal memo describing LibGen as "a dataset we know to be pirated." The memo also noted they would not disclose the use of these datasets. When the question of whether to license content properly came up earlier that year, the decision was escalated to Zuckerberg himself. After that meeting, the licensing efforts stopped. The pirating continued.

Move Fast and Break Things

The lawsuit invokes Meta's famous motto, and it's hard to imagine a more fitting application. This is what "move fast and break things" looks like when applied to the creative work of millions of authors and publishers. It means treating your copyright as an inconvenience to be circumvented in the "AI arms race."

This is the same company that runs Instagram, the platform where millions of visual artists share their work every day. The same company building AI image generators. The same company that wants you to believe they're a partner to creators.

Why This Matters for Visual Artists

The lawsuit focuses on books and publications, but the principle applies to every creator. If Meta is willing to torrent hundreds of millions of copyrighted books from pirate sites while internally acknowledging it's illegal, what makes you think your paintings, photographs, or illustrations are being treated any differently?

Scott Turow and five major publishers have the resources to take this fight to court. Most working artists don't. But this lawsuit matters for all of us, because it will help establish whether companies like Meta can simply take what they want, or whether creators have rights that actually mean something.

I'll be watching this case closely. You should too.

What's your reaction? Does this change how you think about sharing your work on Meta's platforms?

In May 2023, Sting sat down with the BBC ahead of being inducted as a Fellow of the Ivors Academy. He was asked about AI-generated music. His answer wasn't diplomatic: "The building blocks of music belong to us, to human beings. That's going to be a battle we all have to fight in the next couple of years: defending our human capital against AI." Three years later, that battle isn't theoretical. It's in your feed.

The Provenance

Sting made these remarks on May 17, 2023, the same week he became the 23rd Fellow in the Ivors Academy's 79-year history, joining Paul McCartney, Kate Bush, and Peter Gabriel. The interview aired on BBC News, and the quote spread fast. He compared his reaction to AI music to how he feels about CGI in films: "I get immediately bored when I see a computer-generated image. I imagine I will feel the same way about AI making music."

What's striking is the phrase he reached for. Not royalties. Not catalog rights. Human capital. The thing you own before any contract is signed. The decades of practice, the 3am rewrites, the muscle memory and emotional memory baked into every chord you play. AI didn't earn any of that. It scraped it.

What's Changed Since 2023

When Sting said this, most people still thought of AI music as a novelty. Weird covers. Drake deepfakes. A curiosity, not a threat.

Now? Spotify is flooded with AI-generated "ambient" and "lo-fi" tracks, each one collecting fractions of a cent that used to go to living musicians. Music labels are filing lawsuits against Suno and Udio for training on copyrighted catalogs. The Copyright Office is fielding comments on whether AI outputs deserve any protection at all. And every week, another platform quietly updates its terms of service to claim training rights on whatever you upload.

The battle Sting warned about isn't coming. It's here. And the stakes are identical for visual artists. The same scraping infrastructure. The same platforms monetizing outputs while devaluing the people whose work made them possible. The same question: who owns the decades you spent learning your craft?

Human Capital Is the Frame That Matters

Most debates about AI and art get stuck on legality. What's infringing? What's transformative? What's fair use? Those questions matter, but they miss the deeper point Sting made.

Human capital is what you have before any law protects you. It's the reason your work resonates in a way that a statistical average of all art never will. It's not just about whether AI can legally use your brushstrokes. It's about whether the systems we build will value the humans behind the work, or quietly replace them while calling it "efficiency."

That's the battle. And it's one worth fighting.

Your Turn

Sting's phrase "human capital" crystallized something for a lot of musicians. What's the line from an artist, writer, or filmmaker that clarified your own stance on AI and creativity? Drop it below. I want to read the quotes that changed how you think about this.

Hi. First, I paint music by hand, take my own photos and am slightly challenged by the power of digital revisions etc... . I also write poetry which I am revising to be singable songs of my responses to the psalms, but going from the lyrics to the actual music - I get stuck. AI makes is so easy and makes it sound so good... and I get using it as a tool to come up with a sound based on my prompts - then working it backward so that I and friends are actually playing/singing the music tweaked as we see fit.... I don't know how I feel about this as I seem to be able to do all but bring the music and instruments to the lyrics... ai is so helpful in that light and it is fast... but my heart is kind of anti ai so then there is the path of finding someone to do it for me which is also me not doing it, slow and probably expensive... Plus - now when I hear a newer song on the radio I have to wonder how much of it was 100% human written versus helped out with ai or music production platforms... who would know? Musical artists already go back and use great composers melodies etc. in their new music at times.... this is complex in my head and definitely interesting for what will happen in the future. Thoughts?

UPDATE: I sent a message into Tech Support at ASF (it was the weekend), and they were kind enough to not only respond, but to take care of adding in the code properly. It now all works. Thank you ASF and thanks to all of you for your suggestions.

OK - when ASF first put up the corner stickers, I grabbed it and put it on my site. It's been there since the day they made it available.

Now there are "new" stickers and choices (thank you). But what do I do with the old code? Where does it start and where does it end? How do I replace it with the new code, which is SIGNIFICANTLY SHORTER HTML snippet. The original snippet I put up starts at line 4 and ends at line 111 !!!!

I don't want to ruin any other scripts that are up there.

Where is the tech support for this? Can anyone help?

Human Made Art for the win!!!!

This past September I organized a day for artists to "takeover" our small downtown and meet-up for a urban/plen-air event to sketch/paint the downtown scenery. I picked out a local florist and did this illustration. The local business owner took a picture of me while I was out working on the sketch. I had no idea that it would turn into this wonderful bookcover opportunity. A local author started searching for an actual living artist after being scammed twice and paying deposits for work that after the initial sketch was given AI generated work. She found the Facebook posts that helped validate me as an actual living breathing artist. I never thought about how hard it could be for someone looking to commission work to battle the imposters using AI to generate art.

I just noticed that one of my images on my ArtHelper site is flagged as possibly AI-generated. I get it, because the texture I used for it is fairly dramatic. However, the two very similar images that are also on the site weren't flagged. Is there any way to explain the process used, and to let it be known there isn't any AI-generation involved (except maybe in the description of the image where I likely used Arty's suggestions)?

Last week, Udio admitted in court filings that they scraped YouTube audio using a tool called YT-DLP to train their AI music generator. They just... said it. Out loud. In a legal document. And here's the part that should concern every working artist: only one major label is still fighting them.

What Udio Actually Admitted

In their April 29th filing to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Udio explicitly acknowledged that they "obtained audio data from YouTube for use as training data." This isn't speculation or accusation. This is their own admission, on the record. They scraped musicians' work without permission, without compensation, and without so much as asking. Sony Music's response was direct: this is willful copyright infringement, and claiming fair use doesn't change that.

The Settlement Problem

Here's what happened: Universal Music Group settled with Udio last October. Warner Music Group settled with Suno in November and reportedly cut a deal with Udio too. Both got compensatory payments and licensing partnerships. Both got to launch shiny new AI music platforms. And both stopped fighting for a legal precedent that would protect every working musician. Sony Music rejected those settlements. They want a ruling on fair use, not a check. That distinction matters enormously.

Why Visual Artists Should Pay Attention

I know this is a music industry case. But the legal logic is identical to what's happening in visual art. Stability AI faces trial in September 2026 for the same basic question: can you scrape millions of copyrighted works, train an AI on them, and call the output "transformative" enough to be fair use? If Sony loses, the precedent helps every AI company that wants to train on your paintings, your photographs, your illustrations. If Sony wins, it helps establish that creators deserve consent and compensation before their work becomes training data. The summer 2026 ruling could reshape everything.

The Uncomfortable Reality

Most of the music industry took the money. They got their licensing deals and their platform partnerships and their compensatory payments. They decided that was enough. Sony decided it wasn't. They're fighting for a precedent that would protect artists across every medium, not just their own catalog.

I don't think Sony is doing this out of pure altruism. They're a corporation protecting their assets. But sometimes corporate interests and artist interests align. This is one of those times.

One company is still standing in court while everyone else went home with their settlement checks. Whether you're a musician, a painter, a photographer, or any other kind of working artist, that fight is about you too.

What do you think? Is Sony doing the right thing by pursuing precedent over settlement?

Finish the sentence.

One line. No hedging. No paragraph of qualifiers. Just the truest thing you can say about why your work needs to exist.

You already know your answer.

Drop it in the comments.