Lois van Baarle

Lois van Baarle (born 1985), known online as Loish, is a Dutch digital artist and animator whose flowing, warmly lit character work — shared with millions of followers — became one of the defining styles of the social-media illustration era. Her crowdfunded art books with 3dtotal were Kickstarter hits, and she contributed concept art to Guerrilla Games’ Horizon Zero Dawn.

The ArtStation protest

Van Baarle had flagged the problem early — in July 2022 she posted about typing “loish art” into DALL-E mini and confronting the mangled echoes of her own style. When artists flooded ArtStation with “No to AI generated images” placards in December 2022, she joined the protest publicly, explaining that her artwork sat in the training datasets of commercial image generators without consent and that she received “zero compensation for the use of my art, even though these image generators cost money to use.”

Her statement took direct aim at the most common defense of AI training. “Many have compared image generators to human artists seeking out inspiration,” she wrote. “Those two are not the same.” She urged fellow artists to speak out against what she called a predatory practice, argued creators “deserve to be compensated,” and noted the double standard that music generators were being trained on royalty-free catalogues while visual artists’ portfolios were scraped wholesale.

Her position leaves the door ajar: her objection is to nonconsensual, uncompensated scraping — she has pointed to ethically sourced datasets and artist compensation as the precondition for supporting the technology. The protest she helped amplify pushed ArtStation to add “NoAI” tagging and presaged the class-action suit brought by Karla Ortiz and Sarah Andersen weeks later.