In 2021 an oil painting appeared at the 11th Strassen Biennale. It depicted a woman looking intently over one shoulder, a bouquet in one hand and a blue shawl draped low across her back. Its painter, Jeff Dieschburg, won €1,500 but the work, bar slight colour variation and a mirrored perspective, was an almost exact copy of a photograph by Jingna Zhang.
This year, after a two-year legal battle, Zhang won the case in Luxembourg to prove that Dieschburg had breached copyright. In that time, Generative AI, technology which can create pieces in the likeness of work by human artists, was flooding the internet. For Zhang, Dieschburg’s breach and the way AI is scraping artists’ work are the same: “Just because our work is on
