- Police were called to Dragon Con after an artist was accused of selling A.I.-generated artwork at their booth.
- Vendor Oriana Gerez faced backlash and was asked to leave, sparking heated debate across social media platforms.
- Dragon Con currently lacks a clear public policy addressing A.I. art in its Artist Alley or exhibition guidelines.
- Controversy follows past A.I. art incidents, with the Dragon Awards and Fan Expo Canada grappling with similar issues.
I am bothered by this. Has there been any confirmation that this vendor was trying to sell AI output rather than art, or was it just an accusation? I’ve seen too many witch hunts, false positives, and worse to blindly accept an AI accusation, and even the article doesn’t seem clear on it.
Is that illegal?
It’s shitty, for sure, but cops don’t usually arrest people for just being shitty.
Per the comments on the article:
- The DragonCon policy explicitly states AI art cannot be sold and that violating that part of their policy is grounds for immediate dismissal
- The artist refused to leave
- The cops were called to get them to leave
Probably refused to leave, or the situation in general was getting heated.
Likely. That said, it’s a crap thing to do. But, incidents like this also have started an overkill backlash against people who use AI for the simplest tasks who openly take no credit. I get AI takes away from them, but they are shooting themselves in the foot with the incessant need to bash/shame anything done with AI. Hell, I lost feeling in my entire right side of my body, so telling me to suck it up and to use MS Paint is borderline trolling and completely missing the flowers for the trees.
Perfect ad placement. No notes.
give it more of your business data!
<chef’s kiss>
Good. AI garbage does not belong in art spaces.
Hurr durr but engineering prompts is an art!
Shit clickbait. Police had nothing to do with AI and everything with that guy refusing to leave
But why were they asked to leave?
*lady
Meanwhile Dragon Con’s vendor area is still half “mystery boxes.” Not much moral high ground amongst whoever is divvying out vendor spaces.
What kind of stuff is in the boxes? Action figures?
The stuff they couldn’t sell the last few times before that.
Makes sense.
Yeah and other collectibles. Think loot boxes in real life.
I bet the kids eat it up.
It’s not art. AI doesn’t create art. It generates images.
I call it “AI output.”
Art is something made by a person as a form of expression. AI output is just AI output.
They definitely seem to have real art on their site like the article says. I wonder if they had a mixture of things and rather than remove their AI generated stuff they fought with the management. Or they were just flat out asked to leave instead of given opportunity to fix it. I know a lot of traditional artists using AI now for posing and composition layout but they still do the panting etc. But it does look stifled sometimes. Like you can tell it’s been influenced by AI. It makes me sad. Especially since one of the artists used to be super fluid and expressive and now everything feels like they’re painting vectors :( which their merch distributor loves and encourages because it’s easier to print but I think it’s literally killed their business. I don’t think it’s “competitive” I think it’s convenient for a select few and killed their creativity. Fuck AI art.
How do we know they sold AI generated images? Seems all the images on their site is hand made at least.
Yeah, throw him out, you also don’t let people to run with cars on running competitions, so why would genAI art be better?
Should have called swat on them lol
