Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
Amy Stelladia felt exhausted when she found out her art was stolen.
Though the Spanish illustrator has done work for the likes of Disney and Vault Comics, she told The Daily Beast that her life as an artist has been a “constant battle to stay relevant, valuable, and visible.” So when she found out that some of her old work was plundered, she wasn’t completely shocked—though she was a little surprised to find that it was old fanart from Deviantart that was taken.
In fact, Stelladia is one of the many victims of arguably the biggest art heists in modern history. But their work wasn’t taken by a crack team of thieves in an Ocean’s Eleven-style caper. Rather, it was quietly scraped from the web by a bot—and later used to train some of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence models out there including Stable Diffusion and Imagen.
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