Move over, Ship of Theseus — there’s a new paradoxical thought experiment in town.
Some power users of generative AI have grown so comfortable with their new tools — especially image-generating ones — that they now feel entitled to the specific prompts they use to churn out slop, as if the entire technology wasn’t based on the work of human artists that had been ingested without consent.
Consider Amira Zairi, a self-professed “AI educator” and “ambassador” for Adobe, LeonardoAI, and TripoAI, who posted a scathing rant this week on X-formerly-Twitter to her 49,000 followers. Her complaint? Other people were “plagiarizing” her unique AI prompts.
“‘Make your own prompts’ isn’t advice. It’s basic integrity,” Zairi wrote, using syntax that reads suspiciously like text generated by ChatGPT. “I’m honestly fed up. Changing a few words, renaming the prompt, or slightly rephrasing it doesn’t make it yours, the idea is still the same, the vibe is the same, and the results are obviously similar.”
“And no, this isn’t about one or two people, and it didn’t happen once!!!!” Zairi continued. “Creating your own prompts is actually easier than copying someone else’s work! Try it.”
While Zairi is only the latest AI hound to bark about stolen prompts, she’s certainly not the first. Examples abound, as the Daily Dot pointed out back in December: consider a poster who railed about “prompt thieves in the AI art community,” or the “AI artist” who went on a tangent after someone aped his prompt “without knowing it’s mine.”
There’s even a niche market for preventative tools among cybersecurity developers. Late in 2024, an AI researcher named Xinyue Shen developed a tool called PromptShield to guard against so-called “prompt stealing.”
It’s all pretty rich, given that these AI tools were all trained on troves of human-made art and media without permission. In order to create generative AI models, tech companies systematically scrape vast amounts of copyrighted art from the web without consent, licensure, or compensation for the artists. This data is then used to train generative AI models that synthesize and churn out derivative images, an outcome some ethicists argue amounts to labor exploitation.
Put simply, AI bros are mad that people are stealing their recipe for the plagiarism machine — an irony which is pretty hard to ignore.
“What you are describing and complaining about is the fundamental function of the tech you’re advocating for, inextricable from it,” digital artist Rory Blank replied under Amira Zairi’s post. “Hope that helps.”
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