David Revoy
Open-Source Illustrator
French illustrator behind the free-culture webcomic Pepper&Carrot who found thousands of his openly licensed artworks inside AI training datasets — “all without my consent” — and has documented in detail why he refuses generative AI.
Why this score
How the formula works →- +3.6antiVows never to use AI
- +2.1anti4 anti-AI statements (forceful)
- ±0nuancedHolds a documented two-sided view
Weights, statement counts, the ×1.25 multiplier for having a stake in an AI-impacted field, and the formula’s smoothing are already baked in — the points add up to the score (direction-free evidence pulls toward the middle instead): Firmly Anti-AI · 5.7/10
In his words
Thousands of my artworks have been analysed over the last 20 years and are part of the LAION-5B database. All without my consent.
I personally dislike this art, because it tells me nothing about its creators.
Biography
David Revoy (born 1981) is a French illustrator and one of the most prominent artists of the free-software world: his webcomic Pepper&Carrot, published since 2014 under a Creative Commons license and funded directly by readers, is made entirely with open-source tools like Krita on Linux. He was a concept artist on the Blender Foundation’s open movies, including Sintel.
A free-culture artist against free-for-all scraping
Revoy’s case carries unusual weight because he gives his art away. Even so, he found his work embedded in the LAION-5B dataset behind commercial image generators — attribution stripped, license ignored. In a June 2023 post he explained why he would not even label his work #NoAI or #HumanMade: such hashtags, he argued, would only “mark the post and the art as premium content for training future datasets.” He distinguishes AI broadly — he accepts it in photo enhancement and translation — from generative art tools, whose output he dislikes because it says nothing about a creator; he has called AI artists diggers for auto-generated images, “the new digital Readymade of our time.”
Even if it sounds like I’m praising some aspect of AI-generated imagery, make no mistake: I’m still very much against it.
His December 2023 essay “My brushstrokes against AI-art” described his artistic response: pushing his style toward visible brushstrokes and hand gestures, away from the over-smoothed surfaces he sees in generated images. “These developments towards a stronger personal style in my art, though I am pained to admit it, come from the pressure of the existence of AI-generated images,” he wrote — a working artist consciously evolving to stay distinguishable from his imitations.
Quote sources
- davidrevoy.com, 2023(davidrevoy.com)
- davidrevoy.com, 2023(davidrevoy.com)
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/david-revoy
