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Lost $200 on a 'custom' AI art commission that was just a stock image
I paid a guy on Fiverr to make a unique character portrait for a project, and he delivered something that felt off. I did a reverse image search and found it was a slightly tweaked version of a free AI-generated image from a public dataset (specifically from the LAION-5B set). The whole thing made me realize how easy it is for 'artists' to just run a prompt and sell the output without any real skill or original work. Has anyone else gotten burned by paying for AI art that wasn't actually original?
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paige_robinson2416d agoMost Upvoted
That's a rough deal, but it's more about the seller being dishonest than AI art itself. A real artist using AI tools would still put in creative work and be upfront about their process. You just found a bad apple who was trying to make a quick buck.
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the_alex16d ago
That LAION-5B detail is the whole problem. It's not just one bad seller, it's that the tool itself is built on a giant pile of scraped images anyone can grab. How do you even check an artist's process when the starting point is a hidden dataset? The honesty part is almost secondary when the work has no real origin to begin with.
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nathankim16d ago
Man that really sucks, sorry you got ripped off. I used to agree with paige_robinson24 about it just being a few bad sellers. But seeing how easy it is to just grab a free AI image and tweak it, I get it now. This whole thing makes me way more careful about who I hire for any kind of art. Gotta check their process or ask for proof of their work.
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