Xiaohongshu blogger "Sister-in-law Antenna (King of Underpants)" commissioned an artist to create original character illustrations, but unexpectedly discovered that the artist used AI painting technology and was suspected of stealing the pictures. This incident sparked heated discussion on Xiaohongshu, and the video received as many as 29,000 likes. After the blogger questioned the quality of the painting, the artist was unable to provide line drawings and sketches. Eventually, the blogger used one-click image recognition software to reveal that his work was generated by stolen AI, triggering widespread discussions about the fidelity of AI painting technology and copyright issues.
The cause of the matter was that the blogger had doubts about the quality of the paintings he received, and felt that the pictures were "a bit like AI" production. To test her suspicions, she asked the artist to provide line drawings and sketches as proof. However, the artist stated that he was unable to provide these materials, citing lack of prior explanation and personal working habits. What is even more shocking is that the semi-finished drawings provided by the artist in order to prove his "innocence" were eventually revealed by bloggers to be stolen from the Internet using the one-click image recognition function.
The incident highlights the improvement in the fidelity of AI painting technology to the point where it is difficult for the human eye to distinguish the work of human artists from that of AI. In the comment area, many netizens said that with the rapid development of AI technology, it is becoming increasingly difficult to identify whether an image is generated by AI.
The rapid development of AI imaging technology has brought dual challenges of copyright and authenticity issues to the content ecology on social media. At present, there have been cases where AI-generated paintings are used to pass off as personal works, such as the previously exposed fraud incident of the "Three Masters of AI". At the same time, there are also infringement cases of stealing other people’s AI creative works.
The "Sister-in-Law Antenna" incident triggered ethical thinking on the application of AI painting technology, and also reminded creators and platforms to strengthen copyright protection and content review mechanisms to deal with new challenges brought by AI technology. In the future, how to effectively distinguish AI-generated images from manual creation will become an important topic.