Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI...and yet these people just won't leave them well enough alone.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Its a bit delusional to think you can sue them. For a number of reasons, not least of which is that you don't have the funds for a protracted legal battle and that the burden of proof that your work was used is pretty much impossible to prove.
I don't think so. First of all, if a lawyer thinks that I have a strong case, they could agree to be paid after I win, so I don't need to pay out of pocket up front. Second, it is easy to prove that an AI company used my pictures, since they would need to download the pictures to train on them. Alternatively, if a platform sells it to the AI company, there is a record that it was sold for the purposes of AI training.(In that case, we don't have to prove that the image was used for training, since the crime is the sale.) Lastly, since the license and purchase info is contained within the metadata of the picture, they can't argue that the license was unavailable or something. They have it right there in their servers!
The problem is the AI isn't going to use exactly the original image it will take parts of it and use it to create a new image that does not include the metadata. Just proving they downloaded it wouldn't be actionable since they would need to download the image to get your metadata which contains the terms. You would need to prove that they applied the transferred the data to the training algorithm which would be an internal process.
Also there's the concept of consideration to... uh... consider. Is a million dollars reasonable consideration?
But that being said, it's worth a shot. Worst case is you get nothing, but you'd get nothing if you didn't put licensing terms in the metadata anyway. Just seems very unlikely you'll get a million dollars by doing this.
If this were to go to trial, the AI company would have to turn over all the information that could potentially incriminate them, the most important part is the manifest for their training data, which would include my images. If they refuse to turn over this evidence which 1) would immediately prove themselves guilty and 2) they must have, hey could be held in contempt of court.
Also, regarding the licensing price: I would argue it's completely reasonable if you look at it from the perspective of how much the AI company makes, how much I could make if the art was not used for AI, and the cost of creating the art in the first place.
If I was a fully employed artist, who painted 1000$ dollar portraits, then, over the course of my life, I could create maybe 1,000,000$ worth of portraits. This would only be possible if my unique style is not replicated, however. If an AI company perfectly duplicated my style, and sold the results with a 30$ a month subscription I er the course of 50 years, (and we assume 1000 people have that subscription) then the company could make 125030*1000=18 million dollars. Furthermore, there is also a cost to the development of an art style. At the age of 25, assuming the cost of living is 40k a year, the amount of money used to raise me and develop me into an adult that developed that art style would be 1 million dollars.
So, from the perspective of lost revenue, I would be owed 1 million dollars. From the perspective of the AI company's addition revenue as a result of the crime, I would be owed 18 mil, and from the perspective of the cost to develop my art, I'd be owed 1 mil as well. In total, that would mean I lost 20 million dollars as a result of the AI company's crime. A 1 million dollar licensing fee is a 95% discount.
Eagerly awaiting updates on your progress.
I'm not a lawyer, but as an artist, bravo. You've changed how I look at this. No sarcasm here. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾