Eva Toorenent

Eva Toorenent, known online as Evaboneva, is a Dutch illustrator and creature designer whose darkly whimsical fantasy paintings made her a rising star of the European illustration scene — and, since 2022, one of the continent’s most active campaigners for AI training regulation.

Lobbying Brussels, poisoning datasets

Toorenent serves as the Netherlands advisor to EGAIR — the European Guild for Artificial Intelligence Regulation, an artist-founded lobby pressing the EU for consent-based rules on training data. Her position is that opt-out schemes are backwards: they force artists to jump through hoops while leaving all the power with the technology companies. What she wants is opt-in — nothing scraped, nothing trained, without a yes.

She matched advocacy with direct action. Working with the University of Chicago team behind the Glaze and Nightshade tools, Toorenent made her painting Belladonna — named for the nightshade plant — the first artwork to carry Nightshade’s invisible “poison,” data perturbations designed to corrupt any model that trains on the image without permission. MIT Technology Review chronicled her role in what it called artists’ guerrilla war over exploitative AI; she has described her bond with the Chicago researchers as an unexpected friendship forged in “this collective battle.”

Her fight runs alongside the broader European and American artist campaigns — from the ArtStation protests joined by Lois van Baarle to the litigation of Karla Ortiz — but her tools are distinctive: EU lobbying on one hand, adversarial machine learning on the other.