Sam Yang
Artist & YouTuber
Toronto illustrator behind the SamDoesArts YouTube channel (3M+ subscribers) who became a prime target of AI style cloning in late 2022 — and answered with widely viewed videos calling nonconsensual training “an industrial scale violation” of artists’ rights.
In his words
This is genuinely an industrial scale violation of each and every one of our rights.
You and I, we don’t have the option to opt out, and the AI does not have the option to forget.
Biography
Sam Yang is a Toronto-based artist and illustrator whose SamDoesArts YouTube channel — stylized portrait work, drawing tutorials, and art critiques — has made him one of the most-followed art educators online, with millions of subscribers on YouTube and Instagram.
Cloned, then cloned again
In late 2022, Redditors fine-tuned Stable Diffusion models on Yang’s distinctive style and published them under his name — “samdoesarts” model downloads promised his look on demand. When Yang called out the practice to his followers, the confrontation spiraled: the original uploader deleted his accounts amid harassment, and others released further imitation models in retaliation, some explicitly to spite him. The episode became a case study in how style cloning collides with a living artist’s identity and livelihood.
The moment we share them online, they are opted in to the system. If your work so much as exists online, it will be found and it will be used in a piece of AI art.
In December 2022 Yang published “Why Artists are Fed Up with AI Art.,” a calm, methodical explainer viewed by a mass audience. He walked through the LAION-5B dataset’s billions of scraped images, described the research-to-commercial pipeline critics call “data laundering,” cited Greg Rutkowski’s 250,000 prompt uses, and pointed to a double standard: AI music tools were being trained on copyright-free audio to avoid angering the record industry, “so please tell me why is there such a double standard when it comes to visual artists.” He also credited Steven Zapata’s video essay as essential viewing on the subject.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/sam-yang