You know the risk. You know it. I'm not here to tell you something you don't already know.
You've seen the news. You know AI companies have scraped billions of images. You know your work is probably in one of those datasets. You know that an algorithm somewhere can now generate paintings in your style without asking permission or paying you a penny.
You know all of this. And you're still posting unprotected work.
I get it. You're busy making art. You have deadlines. You have a portfolio to maintain, clients to impress, a community to engage with. Protection feels like one more thing on an infinite to-do list.
But here's what I want to say: the cost of doing nothing is higher than you think. And the cost of protection is much lower than you think.
So I'm writing this to a friend. That's what this feels like. Someone from your field telling you something you need to hear.
The Timeline of Extraction
Let me walk through what actually happens. Not the scary version. The realistic version.
This month: Your new illustration goes up on ArtStation, Instagram, Twitter. You get engagement. You're happy. It's exactly why you post—visibility, community, building your brand.
Next month: An AI company's scraper hits your post. Or a previous post. It downloads the image, logs the URL, adds it to a growing queue. No notification. No notification will ever come. You don't know it's happening.
Three months from now: Your image, along with billions of others, is being processed. Cleaned, tagged, organized. It's in a pipeline now. Not unique anymore—one of 5 billion.
Six months from now: A model trains on that data. Maybe Midjourney 7, maybe something that doesn't exist yet. Your aesthetic becomes part of the training distribution. The patterns in your work—the color relationships, the compositional logic, the brushwork simulation—get encoded into statistical weights.
Nine months from now: Someone prompts a model: "Illustration in the style of [your name]." Or they don't even use your name. They describe your visual signature and the model generates it. It's not your work, but it's indistinguishable from your work.
One year from now: A competitor uses that model to generate concept art. A client who would have hired you gets something that looks like your work for £30. An art director training their eye on examples finds your aesthetic floating around in AI-generated outputs, and can't tell anymore where the AI stopped and your actual work began.
This isn't a theory. This is the current timeline. This is happening to thousands of artists right now.
The Cost of Nothing
Here's what happens if you do nothing:
You don't lose your ability to make art. You're not going anywhere.
But you lose exclusivity. Your visual signature, which took you years to develop, becomes freely available as a training signal. That matters because visual distinctiveness matters in creative work. It's how you build recognition, reputation, client relationships. It's hard to charge for your work if AI-generated alternatives look like your work.
You also lose optionality. If you ever want to protect your newer work, you've already given away the template. A model trained on your unprotected old work will know what to extract from new work.
And you lose the argument. If you later try to push back against AI companies, they can say: "Your work was publicly available. We used it legally. You could have protected it."
The cost of nothing isn't zero. It's delayed loss of control, and the slow evaporation of exclusivity around your aesthetic.
The Cost of Protection
Now here's the honest part: Art Vault costs money. £12 a month. That's roughly £144 a year.
I want to be direct about whether that's worth it.
If you're posting one illustration per month, that's £1 per image protected. If you're a prolific digital artist posting daily, that's £0.40 per image. If you're a photographer with a large archive, that's even lower cost-per-asset.
Compare that to what you'd charge a client to license your work. Even at modest rates, one licensed image pays for months of protection.
But I know it's not always about money. Sometimes it's about friction. Adding another tool, another subscription, another thing to remember.
So here's what I'll say: the friction is real, and it matters. But it's smaller than you think, and the protection is automatic once you set it up.
You can protect an entire batch of new work in minutes. Set it and forget it. Every new upload to ArtStation, Behance, your own site—protected. You don't have to think about it.
That's the design goal. Protection should be automatic enough that it doesn't interrupt your creative process.
Why Most Artists Haven't Acted Yet
You're not lazy. You're not ignorant. You know the risk.
But there's something about knowing a risk and choosing to address it that requires a specific mental shift. It requires acknowledging that the threat is both real and time-sensitive. And that protection is a legitimate expense, not paranoia.
Most artists I talk to are waiting for:
- Legal clarity: They want a court to definitively rule that AI training on unprotected images is theft. Then they'll feel vindicated in taking action.
- Cultural momentum: They want to see other artists protecting their work, so it feels normal and expected.
- Easier tools: They want protection to be one-click, built into platforms, or free.
I understand all of these impulses. But here's the problem: these things are not going to happen in time.
Courts move slowly. By the time a ruling comes down, another year of extraction will have happened.
Cultural momentum requires someone to move first. That means you, probably. Someone reading this, from your community, has to start protecting their work and talk about it.
Easier tools would be great. And they're coming. But waiting for them means more of your work gets extracted while you wait.
What I'm Actually Asking
I'm not asking you to be afraid. I'm not asking you to stop posting online. I'm not asking you to change your creative process.
I'm asking you to be pragmatic.
You already know the risk. You already know your work is valuable. You already know that control over your aesthetic matters.
The only question is whether you're going to do something about the work you create going forward.
That's it. Not your past work (though you can protect that too). Not some complete solution that covers every possible threat. Just the new work you're making now.
The work you're going to create next month, next quarter, next year.
Protect it.
How to Get Started
I'm going to make this simple:
- Go to Art Vault. Create an account. Takes five minutes.
- Decide on a storage location—ArtStation, Behance, your website, wherever you currently post.
- Before you upload, run the image through Art Vault. That's it. Two steps per image, and the second one is automatic once you've done it once.
- Upload the protected version where you normally upload.
- Move on with your life.
That's the entire process. You don't need to understand adversarial perturbations. You don't need to become an AI expert. You just need to be willing to add one extra step that takes 30 seconds.
£12 a month. 30 seconds per image. Everything else stays the same.
Why I'm Writing This
Because I was an artist before I was a founder. And I remember what it felt like to realize that my work could be used without permission. That the thing I'd built was valuable enough for companies to extract it.
That moment changes something. It makes you realize that control matters.
I also remember how easy it is to not act. To think "I'll do this next month" and then never do it. To accept the risk as inevitable because acting on it requires just enough friction to make procrastination easy.
This letter is me trying to collapse that gap. To give you the information you need, and the permission you didn't know you needed, to actually take the step.
You don't have to protect your work. It's not required. The world won't end if you don't.
But you built something worth protecting. Your aesthetic is yours. Your control over how it's used matters.
And the only thing between you and protection is 30 seconds and £12 a month.
Make the choice deliberately. Whichever way you choose, choose it knowing exactly what the cost is and what the benefit is.
But don't let it be an accident. Don't let another year of unprotected uploads happen because you never quite got around to it.
You're better than that. Your work is better than that.
Protect it.