He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them

An art portfolio platform designed to protect creators from unauthorized AI training was subjected to multiple large-scale data scrapes in August, with one person obtaining millions of images and publicly announcing the theft on social media. The scraping incidents alarmed artists who had joined the platform specifically to avoid having their work used by major tech companies for AI model training. In a notable reversal, the person responsible for the initial scrape came to regret his actions after witnessing the distress he caused and has agreed to collaborate with the platform's founder on creating an open-source tool to protect artists. The incidents highlight how difficult it is to prevent data scraping on public websites and how current laws have not kept pace with protections against such harvests.