How AI Steals Content
AI systems are trained on massive datasets scraped from the internet—including your creative work. Here's how it happens, why it matters, and what you can do about it.
Summary: AI companies use web crawlers to scrape billions of images, texts, and other content from the internet. This data trains models that can then reproduce work similar to the originals—without attribution, compensation, or consent. Creators often have no idea their work was used. Stelais helps by establishing verifiable proof of authorship before your content enters the public domain.
What This Means
When you publish content online—whether it's art on social media, writing on a blog, or photos on your website—that content becomes a target for AI data collection:
- Crawling: AI companies deploy bots that systematically download content from across the web, often ignoring robots.txt and other opt-out signals.
- Dataset creation: Your content is added to massive training datasets—sometimes containing billions of items—without your knowledge.
- Model training: AI systems learn patterns, styles, and information from this data, effectively encoding your creative work into their parameters.
- Reproduction: The trained AI can generate new content that mimics, references, or directly reproduces elements of your original work.
Why It Matters in the AI Era
The scale and implications are unprecedented:
No consent or compensation
Your work trains billion-dollar AI products, but you receive nothing—not even attribution.
Style replication
AI can learn and reproduce your unique artistic style, enabling others to create "your" work without you.
Market displacement
AI-generated content competes directly with original creators, often at lower cost and faster speed.
Proof problems
When someone uses AI to copy your style or content, proving you were the original becomes extremely difficult.
Legal gray areas
Copyright law is still catching up to AI, leaving creators with limited recourse.
How Stelais Approaches This
Stelais can't stop AI from scraping the internet, but it gives creators the tools to fight back:
- 1Establish priority
Create blockchain-verified proof of when you created your work—before anyone can claim they made it first.
- 2Track your content
Invisible watermarks persist through copying and modification, allowing you to prove ownership of derivatives and copies.
- 3Support enforcement
Use your proofs as evidence in DMCA takedowns, platform reports, and legal proceedings.