Famous AI Artist Says He’s Losing Millions of Dollars From People Stealing His Work
Much consternation spread throughout the artistic community two years ago when Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, submitted an AI-generated “painting” to a Colorado digital art competition and won. Critics claimed that Allen had cheated, but the prize winner didn’t have much sympathy for his detractors: “I’m not going to apologize for it,” Allen said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” He also didn’t seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney—the one he used to create his “painting”— were poised to destroy the art market. “This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”
Now, in an ironic twist, Allen is upset that his work—which was created via a platform that’s been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works—cannot, itself, be copyrighted, and is thus getting ripped off. In March of last year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship” and therefore could not be extended copyright protections. Allen has been trying, since late 2022, to register his painting as a copyrighted work.
