The Truth Behind Signatures on AI-Generated Art

Why a Signature on AI Art Isn’t a Sign of Theft

The results from generative art models, colloquially known as “AI art,” have been making waves on social media and in the art community. Many people are upset, asserting that these models are stealing the work of human artists. One of the biggest misconceptions that is often used as ‘proof’, is the presence of a distorted signature in the bottom corner of the image. In this post, I’d like to clear up this and other misconceptions about how AI art is made and explain why it’s not as sinister as it may seem.

The key thing to understand is that when you see AI art with a signature, it’s not because the model is copying that artist’s work. It’s because the model has learned that when people use certain prompts, like “by [famous artist]” they might want the output to resemble something that a famous artist might have created, and famous art is often signed. When using prompts like “in the style of [famous artist],” you rarely see signatures because the model interprets that prompt differently.

“Artistic painting of dragon by famous artist” (left) “Artistic painting in style of famous artist” (right). Notice the rendered signature in the left image.

It’s also important to understand that AI art is not capable of copying and pasting parts of existing artwork.

Generative AI models (Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, DALL·E 2) are trained on vast amounts of art and other visual…