Hit 900 AI generated images, but the real surprise was image 742

I've been messing with image generators for a while now, mostly for fun and some light freelance stuff. Last week I ticked over 900 total generations and that number itself wasn't the shock. What got me was image 742, which was a straight up copy of a sketch I did by hand in 2019, same odd angle and all. The training data pulled my own stuff out of some portfolio I posted years ago. That hit closer to home than I expected. It made me wonder how many other random folks see their own work pop back through these tools without any credit or heads up. Has anyone else run into their own art or photos showing up in outputs?

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tylermurray5d ago

That's wild but also I gotta point out something, image generators don't pull specific files like that. The training data is way more broad, it learns patterns from millions of images, so it's not like your 2019 sketch got copied and pasted out of your portfolio. What probably happened is your drawing style or that odd angle is common enough that the model recreated something similar by chance. Still, I get why it felt like a gut punch, because it looks exactly like your work. I've had it happen with my own photos where a generated image looked like a shot I took, but it was just the same subject matter and framing, not my actual file. The real issue is nobody knows what's in these datasets, and artists get no say or credit, so your feeling is totally valid even if the mechanics are a bit different than you think.