Wenn Sie nicht bezahlen, werden Ihre Werke "gespendet". Künstler sind zu fettem Vieh für Hacker geworden.

“Bandits” in Northeast China, “Highwaymen” in Shandong, and “Gangsters” in Henan. People are probably no strangers to the looting bandits. In the cyber - space, this oldest profession in human society has a new name, which is hackers. With the continuous increase in Internet penetration, hacker attacks have become more and more common. According to data disclosed by Interpol, a hacker attack occurs every 39 seconds globally.

In the past, the targets of hacker attacks were often commercial organizations such as the American insurance giant UnitedHealth Group, the Brazilian meat giant JBS, and the fast - food chain giant Burger King. However, in the AI era, things have changed subtly, and artists have apparently become a new group of victims.

Recently, the artist website Artists&Clients was extorted $50,000 by the hacker group LunaLock. The latter said that if the ransom was refused, in addition to making all the website's data public, they would also share the works for free with the training datasets of AI manufacturers.

It is understood that Artists&Clients is a platform that connects artists with potential clients and manages commissions. A large number of creative workers such as painters and photographers use it to sell their works. To ensure the interests of users, Artists&Clients clearly requires that AI - generated works should not be used, and also refuses AI manufacturers to use the works managed by the platform.

As soon as this news came out, it instantly triggered a wave of condemnation from a large number of artists on overseas social platforms. It has to be said that hacker organizations are also keeping up with the times and have quickly found the weak point of artists. You know, artists are definitely one of the most hostile groups to AI on this planet. Previously, the auction of AI - created artworks at Christie's was collectively boycotted by 4,000 artists. The anti - AI signs all over the world's most influential general visual art website Artstation are all expressions of artists' anxiety about AI.

All of this is because the progress of AI technology has far exceeded the imagination of artists. Initially, when facing texts, pictures, audios, and videos produced by AIGC (Generative Artificial Intelligence), artists could still laugh at AI works as “soulless”. After all, the content generated by early Stable Diffusion and Midjourney did have a strong AI flavor. But now, the image - generation capabilities of Doubao, Gemini, and ChatGPT have made a qualitative leap, and it can really be difficult to tell whether it is AI - generated or human - made.

As a result, artists have suddenly found that their uniqueness in emotional expression and creativity is almost useless in the face of the ultra - high efficiency of AI. If AI is not restricted, human - created works will soon be submerged by AI. What's even more unacceptable to artists is that AI has objectively achieved “equal rights in creation”. The painting knowledge they have learned over the years and the vocal skills they have trained, even for those who know nothing about this knowledge, with the help of AI, the gap can be narrowed in a short time.

Previously, the well - known AI music creation platform Suno publicly declared, “Our goal is to enable everyone to transform the musical inspiration in their minds into actual musical works through simple and easy - to - use tools.” If everyone can create qualified works with the help of AI, then where is the value of artists?

So the question arises: why is the evolution of AI in the field of artistic creation so amazing? Of course, it is because AI manufacturers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta have collected a large number of works previously created by human artists through various legal and illegal means, and trained GPT, Claude, and Gemini with them. Therefore, some artists with a sense of crisis have formed an alliance for artists' rights, demanding that AI manufacturers should not use their works to train AI models without permission.

Artists and companies that provide services for artists, such as Warner and Sony, have launched a “legal war” globally and have also achieved certain results. For example, the AI unicorn Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright lawsuit. With this example, it will become increasingly difficult for AI manufacturers to illegally use artists' works in the future.

In this way, the hackers' threat to share artists' data with AI companies becomes extremely intimidating. As “good - faith third - parties”, AI manufacturers naturally hope to have as much high - quality data as possible. How could they refuse free data? To keep their jobs from being taken by AI, artists are obviously more willing to pay the ransom.

Why do hackers suddenly target artists? In addition to realizing that AI is their weak point, the continuous decline in the willingness of traditional enterprises to pay ransoms is also an important reason. According to statistics from a third - party network security agency, in 2024, the number of victims announced by ransomware gangs increased compared with the past, but the payment amount decreased significantly, by more than one - third compared with the previous year. The reason is that victims refused to negotiate with hackers and pay the ransom.

In short, as the traditional targets of hackers, even at the risk of user data and trade secrets being leaked, regular commercial organizations are turning to refusing to cooperate with such extortion. So hackers are now targeting artists who pay relatively less attention to network security but are extremely concerned about copyright, which can be regarded as opening up a new blue ocean.

This article is from the WeChat official account “3e Life” (ID: IT - 3eLife). Author: 3e Jun. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.