Stop Dragging Small Businesses Over AI Art

If you run a small business, don’t post an AI image in your local community Facebook group unless you enjoy being yelled at. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count. Someone shares a promo with that waxy AI sheen, and within an hour the comments are full of artists calling them lazy and cheap, calling them thieves, and telling everyone to take their money elsewhere.

These aren’t Coca-Cola. They’re sole traders and cafes and people running something out of their garage. The pile-on treats them like they personally scraped the internet.

I get why artists are angry. Some of their work absolutely did get fed into these models. LAION-5B, the dataset behind Stable Diffusion, is about 5.85 billion image and caption pairs pulled off the open web, and nobody asked the people who made them.

Some of the training was straight-up piracy, too. Anthropic downloaded millions of pirated books to train Claude, and in July a judge signed off on a $1.5 billion settlement, roughly $3,000 per book. That was theft and it got punished. I’ve got no problem with that.

None of that makes the cafe owner the bad guy. Plenty of them just typed a prompt into Canva. Canva, an Australian company, bought Leonardo.ai back in 2024 and wired its image model into the same app basically every small business already uses for menus and flyers. So the tool is sitting right there next to the templates. Were they supposed to know which button is ethically compromised?

Think about who that business was paying for artwork before AI came along. Nobody. They were never going to commission an illustrator for $500 to promote a trivia night. They’d have grabbed a Canva template, a stock photo, or asked a nephew who does a bit of Photoshop. The artists in the comments didn’t lose work over that flyer, because the work never existed.

The models exist now, the weights are out there, and no Facebook comment is putting that back in the box. Stable Diffusion runs on a gaming PC. You can boycott every cafe in town and the tech will still be here the next morning. Hate it all you want, but yelling at sole traders won’t make it go away.

Artists hate hearing this, but they’ve been stealing from each other forever. Everyone knows “good artists copy, great artists steal”. Picasso almost certainly never said it. Steve Jobs pinned it on him and the name stuck. The version with a paper trail is T.S. Eliot in 1920: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.”

Eliot was praising the thieves, and artists have been quoting him proudly ever since.

The Louvre has let copyists set up easels in front of the masterpieces since it opened in 1793. Art schools still make students do master copies. Every guitarist alive learned by lifting somebody else’s licks, and Led Zeppelin spent six years in court over the intro to Stairway to Heaven before they won in 2020.

Roy Lichtenstein built a career out of copying comic book panels. Drowning Girl, which hangs in MoMA, is a cropped splash page from DC’s Secret Hearts #83, drawn by Tony Abruzzo. Lichtenstein trimmed the caption and changed the boyfriend’s name from Mal to Brad. Abruzzo got no credit. Lichtenstein’s Nurse, lifted from another romance comic, sold at Christie’s in 2015 for $95.4 million.

Shepard Fairey’s Obama Hope poster is built from an AP photo by Mannie Garcia. Fairey sued the AP first, claiming fair use, then admitted he’d lied about which photo he used and pleaded guilty in 2012 to destroying evidence. The original is in the National Portrait Gallery anyway.

Walk through the artist alley at any comic convention and count the tables selling prints and stickers of characters owned by Disney, Nintendo and Studio Ghibli. Nobody licensed those, and Disney mostly leaves them alone. It is, however, suing Midjourney for letting people generate its characters. The same act gets you a table at a comic con if a person does it and a federal lawsuit if a machine does it.

That’s what AI is doing, too. It’s transforming the work of others. The only difference is who’s holding the brush.

A diffusion model doesn’t keep a folder of your paintings. It learns patterns from billions of images and spits out new ones. When Getty took Stability AI to court in the UK, the High Court ruled in November that the model isn’t an infringing copy because it doesn’t store the images it trained on. Getty’s appealing, but it also got stuck paying most of Stability’s legal costs.

In the US, Judge William Alsup ruled last year that training Claude on books was fair use, and he described it better than I can: “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them” but “to turn a hard corner and create something different.”

Something different. Same two words Eliot used, 105 years later, from a federal judge.

I’m not saying anything goes. If someone prompts for a near copy of a specific painting and sells it, that’s copying and the law already handles it. Andy Warhol’s estate lost 7-2 at the Supreme Court in 2023 because his Orange Prince, based on Lynn Goldsmith’s photo, got licensed to a magazine for the same job her photo did. Even Warhol doesn’t get a free pass. The line is how the finished work gets used, and it applies to people and machines the same way.

What doesn’t make sense is holding a machine to a standard no human artist has ever met. If learning from other people’s work without permission is theft, then every artist in those comment sections is a thief, and so is everyone they learned from.

Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz, the artists suing Stability AI, Midjourney and friends, were meant to get the first jury trial over AI image training this month. It’s now been pushed back to April 2027. That’s a fair fight between people with lawyers, and I’ll be reading every filing.

The comment section under a local cafe’s trivia night post is a weird place to have it.