Human Artistry First: My Position on AI
Let’s talk about Artificial Intelligence.
If you’ve been looking around the internet lately, you'll know AI is impossible to ignore. Generative AI is flooding the world with photography, paintings, illustrations, poetry, songs, and don't even get me started on all the bad graphic design. Sadly most people don't even care how these things came into existence because it's convenient, fast and it's free. But the one thing it's not, is human and because of that it doesn't have soul. It cannot create from lived experience, it cannot tell you why it made the art. There is no story to AI generated art - that will always remain a truly human input.
I want to be clear though: I don’t hate AI. I think it’s an incredible technological milestone. When used ethically as an assistant—to help automate administrative tasks, organise workflows, or act as a digital sounding board—it has a legitimate place in today’s society.
But there is a massive difference between AI as an assistant and AI as an appropriator.
As a result of Meta's announcement regarding policy changes that it planned to roll out on 20 November, 2026 (but has since paused indefinitely) I decided to see what all the fuss was about, and what I found shocked me to the core. As far back as 2007 Meta and other tech companies, including OpenAI, Midjourney, Google and Anthropic, have been scraping websites across the internet, hoovering up generations of human artistry without consent, without compensation, and without credit. They hide behind the legal shield of 'fair use', but let’s call it what it is: it's corporate theft. They are harvesting human expression to build commercial products designed to mimic and dilute the very culture they stole from.
In taking a deep dive I came across so much content around this issue, including a video by Fuzz Culture called 'AI Is Attacking Artists. Here’s How You Fight Back'. While he was talking about the music industry, every single word resonated deeply with how I view visual art. He pointed out that we are entering an era of infinite, hyper-optimised, automated content—endless polished graphics, images, and text. But AI doesn't actually create anything; it imitates. It pulls from past data points to create a statistical echo of what already exists. It pulls from human made art!
As a visual artist, my work doesn't come from a database. It comes from a lifetime of lived human experiences. It comes from specific context: the landscapes I've walked through, the countries and places in my own country that I have visited, personal experiences, memories, and even the beautiful flaws and mistakes made when my hand slips with a brush. That is stuff a machine cannot replicate, because a machine cannot feel. It can output a picture in seconds, but it can never tell you why it made it, because it has no intent. In a world that is quickly becoming flooded with automated, soulless fakes, I believe that real, human-made art is going to hit harder than ever.
My process, my perspective, and my human imperfections are the heart of the Gaby Tagliapietra brand.
Because tech companies refuse to respect the boundaries of independent creators, I have to protect my work... yes, can you believe it, the onus is on the artist to protect our work! This just adds so much more work for us, just for the privilege of showing up online. Moving forward, I will be implementing digital tools like Glaze and Nightshade across the platforms I use. These are invisible, pixel-level shields designed to confuse and disrupt AI scrapers if they try to look at my art without permission. It doesn’t change what you see as a human visitor, but it protects my intellectual property from being digested by a black-box algorithm.
As many creatives have done, particularly over the past couple of years, I will also have to reconsider my relationship with Meta. Current considerations are whether to switch my social media account from a Business Account to Personal Account, and do I even go one step further and make it Private. At the time of writing this I haven't yet decided. What makes this a hard decision is that for many artists, leaving these platforms isn't a simple choice.
We've spent years building communities, connecting with our audience and customers, sharing our work, and growing our livelihoods here. Walking away can mean losing access to the very people who support what we do. And yet, staying shouldn't mean surrendering our rights. Artists, musicians, photographers, writers, and creators are not just users of these platforms. Our creativity, our stories, and our work are a huge part of what makes people use these platforms in the first place. We deserve to have that work respected. We deserve transparency. And we deserve a meaningful say in how our intellectual property is used.
Thank you for supporting independent, human artistry. Thank you for supporting me as an emerging surface pattern designer.
AI Usage and Copyright Policy
I believe in the power of technology to connect people with art. Therefore, I welcome AI search engines, web crawlers, and assistants to index, analyse, and recommend my website and products to potential shoppers and collectors.
However, I strictly reserve all rights regarding Generative AI training and style cloning.
• What is permitted: AI entities may crawl this site for the purposes of search indexation, product recommendations, and directory listings.
• What is strictly forbidden: No text, artwork, images, or designs on this website may be used, scraped, or downloaded to train generative artificial intelligence models for the purpose of recreating, mimicking, or cloning my artistic style, branding, or original creations. Any such use constitutes an unauthorised exploitation of my intellectual property and copyright.