Fan Art Copied by AI: Glass Houses, Copyright and the Pile-On

Somebody who builds a house out of glass shouldn’t be the first one at the window throwing rocks. Everybody knows the saying. Almost nobody remembers it when the rock lands in their own living room.

Art has always lived in that glass house. Painters copy the masters to learn. Comic artists redraw famous covers and sign them “after” the original artist. Fan artists paint characters they don’t own and sell the prints at conventions, and the companies that own those characters mostly let it slide, because chasing every fan with a sketchbook would cost far more than the fans could ever pay. Everybody borrows, and everybody mostly looks the other way.

AI broke that quiet arrangement. Now the copying is fast, cheap and visible, and people who spent years borrowing comfortably are suddenly finding their own work borrowed back.

What happened when a fan painting got copied by AI

A professional artist posted to Facebook in a rage. Years ago, she’d painted Hawkman and Hawkgirl, two DC Comics characters, in acrylic. Now she’d found her composition in a Facebook ad: same poses, same placement of a wing and a mace, run through an AI tool and turned into a short animated clip on a comic fan page. No credit and no payment. Her post opened with “WHAT IN THE ACTUAL FUCK” and ended with “NEVER DEFEND AI ART TO ME AGAIN.”

Most of the replies agreed with her. A good number of others pointed out the obvious, some kindly and some not.

Hawkman isn’t hers. Neither is Hawkgirl. She painted DC’s characters without a license, sold the original, and was now furious that somebody had copied her copy.

I found that amusing. I don’t say it to be cruel. Having your work lifted feels lousy, and I know the feeling. But a person who makes a living painting other people’s intellectual property is standing in the most fragile glass house there is, and throwing rocks at anyone who copies her is going to break some of her own windows.

Watch: Copying AI Art Because It Can't Be Copyrighted(!?) (And My Thoughts on AI Art), A Cup of Chamomile

Can you copyright fan art of someone else’s characters?

Partly, and much less than most fan artists think.

Under US law, a fan painting is a derivative work: a new work built on an existing one. The artist can own what she added herself: her composition, her brushwork and her choices. But the Copyright Act draws a hard line for derivative works made without permission. Section 103(a) says protection for a work that uses preexisting copyrighted material “does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.”

Translated: the parts of her painting that are Hawkman and Hawkgirl were never hers to protect. Whatever thin layer of originality sits on top of DC’s characters is the most she could claim, and a court would have to peel it apart from the characters she didn’t have permission to use.

Publishers tolerate fan art because suing fans is bad business. A blind eye isn’t a license, though. Several commenters made exactly that point, one of them because a toy company’s lawyer once sent him a cease and desist over artwork built on its figures.

Can a fan artist sue someone who copies her fan art?

Rarely, and it’s a fight she’d probably lose.

A US artist has to register a work with the Copyright Office before filing an infringement suit. (More on how copyright registration works) The Supreme Court confirmed that in 2019, in Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com. She’d also need to have registered before the copying began to collect statutory damages or attorney’s fees. Then she’d have to show what she lost, and she’d be walking into court with an unlicensed painting of somebody else’s superheroes as her evidence. The page that posted the clip reportedly operates out of Mexico City, so a second country’s courts would get involved too.

To her credit, she said in the comments that she never intended to sue. Her complaint was about credit. She has a fair point there. Comics have a long tradition of the homage, where an artist redraws a famous layout and signs it “after” the original artist. Taking someone’s composition with no nod at all is poor manners in any medium.

But credit runs both ways, and she didn’t give DC any either. That’s the glass house.

What she could do, if she wanted it gone, is file a takedown notice with the platform. That doesn’t require a lawsuit or a registration.

Most people who get copied find that’s the only remedy worth the time.

I learned that myself. A scammer once took several of my books and resold them under another name. I sent a cease and desist, and it worked on that one. Then I realized I’d spend the rest of my life playing whack-a-mole with people like him, and I stopped chasing them. Copying was a problem for writers and artists long before anybody typed a prompt.

Is copying a painting with AI different from copying it by hand?

No. The tool doesn’t change what was done.

Someone found her painting, fed it to an image tool and told it to make something realistic. A person made that choice. Before AI, the same person could have traced it, redrawn it or run it through Photoshop, and people did all of that constantly. Commenters with decades in the business told stories of their work being traced, photocopied, resold at conventions and stripped of their signatures, years before any of these tools existed.

One commenter said to blame the thief and leave the getaway car out of it. The artist answered that a human still steered the car.

She’s right about that, and it settles the argument. The person who chose to copy her painting is responsible for it. The software isn’t.

Speed is the one real difference. A tracer needed an afternoon and some skill. A prompt takes a minute and none. That makes copying more common and the anger louder, but it doesn’t move the blame.

I use AI tools every day, and I’d never feed someone’s painting into one and pass the result off as mine. My rule there is about stealing, and AI has nothing to do with it. It’s a tool. Use it or don’t, and if you use it to take someone else’s work, you’re a thief who happened to own a computer.

AI Derangement Syndrome shows up here the way it always does. The copying stopped being about the person who did it and became about the technology, and once that happened, nobody in the thread could talk about anything else.

Why did the crowd turn on the commenter who disagreed?

Because he disagreed, and a crowd that has picked a side doesn’t tolerate that.

One man posted an old trading card of the same two characters and suggested her painting was derivative too. He was wrong about the resemblance, and plenty of people said so politely. Then the thread did what these threads always do. More than sixty replies piled onto him. “Are you stupid?” “Are you blind?” “Donkey of the day.” “Are you stupid for fun or do you do this professionally?” Several were obscene, a couple were slurs, and one told him to “eat a big AI generated dick.”

For a bad opinion about composition.

Nobody in that pile needed to say anything. The point had been made by the tenth reply. Replies fifty and sixty weren’t arguments; they were people taking their turn to kick someone who was already down, and enjoying it. That’s a dogpile, and it’s cruelty with a cause stapled to it.

Another commenter got the same treatment for saying AI had made the painting “look better.” That’s a rude thing to post on an artist’s page, and it deserved a short answer. It didn’t deserve a mob. Even the people sympathetic to the artist split into factions and started calling each other morons over whether the poses, the characters or the software deserved the blame.

I’ve been on the receiving end of one of these. It doesn’t feel like a debate. It feels like being surrounded, and the people doing it never think they’re the bullies, because they’re sure they’re defending something.

What should an artist do when her work is copied?

Start with what you can protect. Paint your own characters, or get a license for someone else’s, and the work is fully yours to defend. Register the pieces that matter to you before anything happens to them. Keep dated originals and files. If a copy turns up, send the platform a takedown notice. It works faster than any lawsuit you could afford.

None of that is glamorous. All of it works.

And if your own work is built on characters you don’t own, think twice before you ask a few thousand strangers to be outraged on your behalf. Some of them will notice the glass.

For readers, the lesson is simpler. When a thread picks a villain, you don’t have to join in. You can disagree once, with the facts, and then leave. The pile doesn’t need you.

The legal details for writers are in copyright law for writers and AI and copyright, and the larger argument about AI and copying is in is writing with AI theft. The Renaissance faire pile-on is the same crowd in a different costume. More is in the AI Derangement Syndrome and Dogpile series and the AI and Writing Hub, and if you want help using these tools in your own work without crossing that line, look at my AI services.

Glass houses aren’t going anywhere. Everybody who makes things lives in one. The best you can do is know which walls are yours, and keep your rocks in your pocket.

Frequently Asked Questions