I am in charge of art in a group project for a university class: video game design. Initially, my classmate (who is doing everyone's work using AI because our other classmates are slackers, even though I have been helping this classmate finish the project and I explicitly said that I want to do art) generated generic AI images for the project.
That's bad enough, so I reiterated that I am in charge of art (my name is tied to any assets in the project, not his). He let me draw my own images.
A few hours later, he fed my art into an AI art generator to get another image for our project. He may have generated more than one; I've only seen one. Now, the AI images aren't just based on unknown artists/image sources. They are explicitly based on my art. My art was the prompt. He did not tell me he was doing this; in fact, he told nobody in our group. I did not consent to this.
I've been distraught for the past 12 hours. I strongly asked him not to do this again, and I once again reiterated that I am ready to contribute to the group and can draw whatever is needed. (This image, by the way, is not required for our project.)
AI usage/training does steal from artists, and it is rarely consensual.
The counterarguments that I have heard include:
"The appeal of AI is that it does work that you don't want to" - But art is not his role, and it never was. It has always been mine, and it takes effort on his part to take over.
"He's doing you a favor" - He is assuming that I want this despite multiple discussions about how I don't want AI images in our project, and he did not ask for permission to do this "favor."
"If the professor expects art from every group, of course some groups will use AI if they do not have an artist" - I may not personally agree with doing that, but I'd understand it. However, that's not the case here. My group has an artist: me.
"You can't be offended by someone else's ignorance" - We are assuming he's ignorant despite doing this multiple times and dabbling in AI music production as well. Even with that assumption, my work is involved. I think I'm allowed to feel hurt, just as you're allowed to think it's unreasonable to feel hurt.
Anyway, I do intend to report this to the professor. Not with the intention of sending this guy to the academic judiciary, because that's really not the point, but with the intention of getting the professor to add rules to the syllabus to protect any creative minds that enroll in this video game design class in the future.
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