David Revoy

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.”

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.