Kelly McKernan’s paintings are often striking images of female figures in bright colors of green, blue, pink or purple.
McKernan uses the pronoun they instead of his or her to call themself. The 37-year-old artist from Nashville, Tennessee calls their works “surreal.” They say they are “dealing with discomfort in the human journey.”
About a year ago, McKernan began seeing online images strangely similar to their own. They soon learned that companies were feeding artwork into AI systems to train software programs to create similar images.
Surviving as an artist is difficult enough. The pandemic made it worse. But now McKernan faces another threat: artificial intelligence (AI).
McKernan told the Associated Press, “I didn’t give my consent for my name or work to be used this way.”
McKernan said they even tried to contact some of the companies to say “Hey, little artist here, I know you’re not thinking of me at all, but it would be really cool if you didn’t use my work like this.” But there was no answer.