She asked artists to paint her. Then she fed their work to Meta AI.
Written by: Adem Çalhanoğlu
Edited by: Thuth Htet San
There’s too much internet drama for a single article to cover, plus I’m too busy to be an expert gossip, but there’s one that wound me up. About Alana O’Brien.
If you’ve missed it, bless you, but still, here’s what happened. Alana O’Brien is a 20-year-old Australian influencer whose face looks like it walked straight out of a Renaissance (stress on the second syllable and say it as re-NEY-sance) painting. Big eyes, soft features, high cheekbones, and a perfectly oval face—that Pre-Raphaelite ting. She started posting videos with captions akin to “paint me like one of your French girls,” and thousands of independent artists responded. In the theme of “Golden Brown” by The Stranglers, they drew her, they painted her. Digital art, traditional oils, watercolours, pastels, pencil sketches, the lot. People were genuinely gassed, celebrating her beauty in the way artists have celebrated muses for centuries.
Then she announced a partnership with Meta AI.
Every single piece of art made for her, all that labour and love, was effectively being fed into Meta’s algorithm. The backlash was instant and brutal. The artists started defacing their own work, deleting, publicly denouncing her, and some have basically turned her face into the rightfully slain Charlie Kirk. She’s apologised, typical PR coping as per usual, but honestly? The die has been cast. The art’s already in the algorithm.
This is certainly a fundamental betrayal of trust and labour, and it shows beyond just one influencer being a twat making dodgy business decisions. When those artists drew Alana, they were engaging in something human and ancient. They were honing their craft, building community, and celebrating beauty. Each piece represents hours of work and years of skill. The act of painting Alana was not about technical skill; it was an act of curation. Anyone can draw any person, but they chose her specifically for her beauty. It’s intentionality. It’s the thousand tiny choices that make one's painting theirs and not anyone else’s.
Alana or any of her fans reading, I’m not saying that Alana betrayed the whole art community, but she is a sellout. She not only monetises her image. She monetised their labour without asking, let alone crediting them or even PAYING them. She fed all of it to a system specifically designed to eventually replace them.
Right, so how do these AI image generators actually work? They don’t “learn” the way humans do. They’re not looking at Renaissance paintings and thinking, “Oh, I see, the light falls like this, the proportions work like that, there’s chiaroscuro.” They’re performing statistical analysis on millions of images, finding correlations between the text prompt and visual elements. When you type “woman in Baroque style,” the AI reconstructs an approximation based on every Baroque-style image in its training data.
The training data in question? Largely scraped without permission. Every fan art piece, every commission, every personal project you’ve ever uploaded becomes potential fodder. The AI doesn’t get inspired. It doesn’t reinterpret. It flattens. It makes mimicry that looks plausible but has a zilch of the intentionality that defines art.
I’ve spent two years writing a 185,000-word novel called “To Walk Beside a Demon.” It’s basically a political urban fantasy novel about a Turkish-British student who summons a jinn to fight alongside her against injustice. Every single scene required decisions that no algorithm could make. How can ChatGPT truly understand the complexity of code-switching in the case of that student’s shift from a normal London accent to a Yorkshire Tyke? How do we grasp that justice and vengeance are always at loggerheads, and it is being amplified with jinnic influence? How does one be vulnerable in a world that sees it and empathy as weak?
Basically, I researched Turkish political culture, Islamic theology, Hindu mythology, and British regional accents, and that’s only the top layer of the chai, that thin layer of coagulated milk that forms on the top. I made mistakes, and I revised endlessly. Even though it is still not my ideal, it represents my learning, my values, and everything.
We need to be honest about what’s happening here. People are flooding the market with AI-generated novels, artworks, and even scientific papers; they’re far from being genuine creators and authors. They’re bloody grifters.
They’ve spotted that platforms reward volume over quality. They’ve realised they can generate hundreds of romance novels or fantasy covers without possessing any actual expertise in romance, fantasy, or storytelling. They’re exploiting the gap before audiences fully realise that AI slop is, well, slop. The same things happen for art, we won’t have much more time until Pinterest, DeviantArt, or Behance are chock-full of AI kitsch that shows make-believe works that commit artistic theft so smoothly that Sade would take a bow.
Anyone should be able to write a novel or a fanfic if they’re willing to learn, to fail, and to feel cringe about their works sometimes. But there’s a massive difference between a beginner earnestly developing their craft and some prat using AI to fake expertise they haven’t earned. The former enriches our culture. The latter dilutes into grey sludge.
Creativity isn’t some luxury hobby; it is accessible, it is within your eyesight, or even on your table. It is how we deal with our trauma, how we celebrate joy, communicate across time, and understand ourselves. When we hand it over to algorithms (read: Clankers), we’re giving away the things that make us human. Human creativity emerges from consciousness, from the need to express something that doesn’t yet exist. An algorithm cannot do that yet. For now, it does not have consciousness; it cannot count how many Rs in “strawberry”, it cannot tell time, and sometimes it takes algorithmic shrooms to hallucinate. It cannot help but say something. It can only approximate what’s already been said.
Alana O’Brien thinks she’s a good larrikin and apologises, but she cannot resurrect the dead; she cannot remiss herself. The art’s in Meta’s database now. It’ll influence outputs for years, to the point where the AI trains itself from other AI works. Her reputation got put in a spliff and smoked because she wants to commodify and cheapen the artist’s labour and their generosity.
Don’t be like Alan O’Brien, don’t be the “absolute weapon” who sells out their community for a corporate partnership. Don’t trade your humanity for efficiency. The messy, difficult, time-consuming process of creation isn’t a bug. It’s the entire bloody point.
Your art matters. Your words matter. Your voice matters. Your flaws matter. They’re yours. Don’t let anyone, human or algorithmic, convince you otherwise.
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