Dave Rapoza
Illustrator & Concept Artist
Illustrator and concept artist for Marvel, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Magic: The Gathering who publicly quit Wizards of the Coast over AI art and became a blunt online voice against models he says are trained to imitate artists like him.
In his words
It’s not that my art looks AI, it’s that AI looks like me — they’re stealing from me and artists like me.
Biography
Dave Rapoza is an American illustrator and concept artist known for high-detail cover and card art, including work for Marvel, a celebrated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles reimagining, and Magic: The Gathering. He built much of his following in public, sharing process work and tutorials online, which made his stance on AI both visible and influential within the illustration community.
Quitting over AI
In early 2024 Rapoza announced he would no longer work for Wizards of the Coast, after the Magic: The Gathering maker publicly disavowed AI art and then, in his telling, used AI-generated imagery to promote its products anyway. He framed it as a matter of integrity: if you take a moral stand, he argued, you have to actually pay attention and mean it. He has since been one of the more combative artist voices on X, rejecting the notion that models trained on scraped work are anything but theft.
His signature framing inverts the usual accusation: the problem, he says, is not that his hand-made art resembles AI output, but that AI output resembles him — because his images and those of his peers are in the training data. For Rapoza the harm is personal and economic, not abstract.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/dave-rapoza