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Oh wow, Maggie. You could swap out William Morris for Kusama and this was my story beat for beat. Honestly. Thank you for writing this up, it makes me feel way less naive and gullible if they were able to trick you as well. I agree with your conclusion; this is all going to hell so quickly.

The amount of ai pieces has to already outnumber legit & hand created ones. Etsy could fight it by say limiting the volume of listings one store can have, but they don’t want to be Etsy anymore; they want to be EBay/SHEIN.

There’s an entire genre of YouTube hustle that’s focused on teaching people how to ai generate digital art by the thousands and flood Etsy with the listings. It’s probably the most popular ā€œmake thousands overnight with this one weird trickā€ topic right now.

Ugh, that's so fucking depressing. I hate that it's working, too. Gutting culture to make a quick buck used to be reserved for record label executives and their ilk. I might be happy for this new wealth distribution if it didn't kill the culture 100x faster.

I love opportunities for anyone to create value but the whole sell here has been how to make money w/o doing any valuable work. Feed PDFs to AI & generate audio books & podcasts! Upload AI cookbooks & coloring books, etc. It’s like printing out your Google search results to sell them.

It really is depressing because it’s selling only the illusion of value rather than anything valuable. And it’s everywhere because when only volume matters, curation works against the model. I bought a ā€œhighly ratedā€ garlic press on Amazon that shattered on 1st use. 100% junk.

The work I can find of hers is way weirder than these. I can't find many landscapes or pointillism style flowers, but just so many polkadots. I like them a lot, but don't want to hang AI generated art in my home.

Like, I think I know the answer, I'm just super bummed because I really liked them at first and was hyped that I found a new artist I liked lol. I think I fell in love with a prompt 😭😭😭

I feel like I generally have a pretty good eye for spotting AI art, so I can only imagine how many people are getting fooled by these sorts of sellers, and it's only going to get worse.

Personally, these don’t look like her work. She mainly works in fewer colors with only circles and stronger patterns. I also couldn’t find these, or ones that looked similar, when I searched. (I hate that this is where we’re at but I appreciate you supporting artists and not AI.)

I'd say they aren't really Kusama's style and č³‡ę²»é€šé‘‘ in the top right is the name of an unrelated Chinese historical text from the Song dynasty. AI or not, it's a bit off

And good catch on the historical text - I only translated the Japanese in the second batch, and they said stuff like "Infinite time" which was a theme she had. I'm wondering if some of those simpler ones are legit, but honestly it all just seems junk at this point :/

Yeh I think they're using her name for clout but I suspect the rest is cobbled together from different sources. Such a shame there's no way to reverse search for the original artists, like you say. There's something resembling a signature in the bottom left of the second image of the first batch

Yeah I definitely agree it's not her style. I had never heard of her before seeing these prints so I didn't know better until I dug into her work more and couldn't find anything that remotely resembled these. I wish it was easy to track down what art these were trained from, you know?