Marc Brunet
Art Educator & Former Blizzard Artist
Ex-Blizzard senior artist turned YouTube art educator (1.9M subscribers) and Cubebrush founder. Calls generative image models engines built on art “taken without permission” — and now poisons his own drawings with Nightshade before posting them, hoping to “do maximum damage.”
In his words
The vast majority of all the art that was used to train these AIs were taken without permission by unscrupulous programmers from artists all around the world, without their consent and without compensation.
Just doing my part to help, you know, ruin the AI that they built on stolen work from all of us. The kind of petty revenge that I’m a fan of.
Biography
Marc Brunet is a Montreal-born artist and entrepreneur who spent years as a senior artist at Blizzard Entertainment — joining the Overwatch team as a 2D/3D character artist during pre-production after contributing to StarCraft II and Heroes of the Storm — before leaving to teach. He founded the digital-art marketplace Cubebrush in 2014 and created ART School for Digital Artists, one of the most popular online art programs, alongside a YouTube channel of weekly art-education videos with 1.9 million subscribers.
From explainer to sabotage
As image generators convulsed the art world in December 2022 — the month ArtStation portfolios filled with “No AI” protest images — Brunet published “The Fundamental Problem With AI Art,” a teacher’s walkthrough of how models trained on the LAION-5B dataset absorbed billions of scraped images. His prescriptions: disclose AI use, keep fully generated images off portfolio sites and out of professional work, and “hold off on using any AI image generators for now until they are retrained on ethically sourced data.”
Artists shouldn’t be replaced — we should instead be supported with greater and greater tools to unlock our full potential and keep pushing art forward.
By April 2025 patience had curdled into action. In “Making art to poison GEN AI models,” Brunet — who says he usually avoids the topic because AI “doesn’t deserve the exposure” — ran his new drawings through Nightshade, the University of Chicago tool that corrupts scraping models, after OpenAI publicly complained about such “abuse.” His response: “Kind of sounds to me like thieves mad at the homeowners for changing their locks.” He remains a pragmatist about the technology itself, welcoming genuine workflow tools and even artist-owned models trained solely on their own work — but treats today’s generators as built on theft.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/marc-brunet