When Your Work Becomes Training Data

What changes when an image is no longer only seen, but becomes part of what a system learns from?

I recently came across a series of AI-generated images by an artist I follow online. They were attractive, carefully made and visually coherent, with the same woman appearing in different situations throughout the series.

The process was openly described. A custom LoRA had been trained on selected images and used with an image model to generate new ones.

The disclosure itself did not trouble me. What stayed with me was a much smaller detail in the explanation: “an image that I chose.”

I kept coming back to the word chose. Chosen from where? Was it one of the artist’s own photographs, an image generated before, or something found online? I do not know, and I am not suggesting that anything improper happened. But the question stayed with me.

When looking becomes learning

For a long time, I thought I understood what happened when I put a photograph online. Someone could look at it, save it, share it, be influenced by it, perhaps even imitate something from it. None of that was particularly new.

What feels different now is the possibility that an image can become part of a training set. It may be used not because someone wants to look at it, but because they want a system to learn from it and eventually produce something else.

That distinction matters to me. I am comfortable with someone seeing my work. I am much less comfortable with my photographs becoming training material without my knowledge.

On my website, I use a small copyright notice. I know that it cannot prevent someone from downloading an image or copying a piece of text. What it does say, however, is something quite simple: this work has an author.

What does publishing mean now?

The harder question is what authorship means once a work is no longer simply being viewed, but used as material from which another system can learn. It extends well beyond photography, to writing, video, music, illustration and almost anything else we make public online.

Once something is accessible, it can of course be seen. Increasingly, it can also be collected, analysed and reused in ways that were not necessarily part of the original act of publishing.

I still want my photographs to be seen and my writing to be read. That has not changed. What has changed is my awareness that making something public may also make it available for purposes I never intended.

The photographs are gathered here:
Selected Works