When Art Travels Without Its Artists: Who Gets Credit in the Age of Pinterest and Ai?

An artwork can travel further than the person who created it. A photograph is posted to Instagram. Someone saves it. It appears on Pinterest. It gets shared on WhatsApp. Someone else discovers it months or years later and uses it as a reference for their own work. By then, the artist’s name may be nowhere in sight.

A recent Caribbean art controversy brought this issue into focus.

The original image was created by Nigerian photographer Steel Visuals. The image later appeared on Pinterest, where Guyanese artist Jamal Durant encountered it and believed it was AI-generated. It wasn’t.

Durant subsequently used the image as the basis for his painting The Cost of Silence. The similarities between the two works sparked discussions online.

But beyond the question of who did what, there is a bigger question worth asking:

Before using an image found online as a reference, how much research should a creator be expected to do?

When an image loses its context

The internet has made visual culture incredibly accessible. That accessibility has benefits. Artists discover new influences, audiences encounter work from places they may never have otherwise seen, and ideas travel across borders almost instantly. But there is a downside. Images often travel without their original context.

An artist’s name can disappear from a repost. A caption can be removed. A watermark can be cropped. A screenshot can circulate without any information about its source.

Eventually, the image remains, but the person behind it becomes difficult to find.

The image survives. The credit doesn’t.

Pinterest is a particularly interesting example. Finding an image there does not necessarily mean the person who uploaded it created it, owns it, or has permission for others to reproduce it. For creators, “I found it online” cannot necessarily answer the more important question: Who made this?

What responsibility does a creator have?

There is no single answer to how much research is enough. But when a creator intends to use an existing image as a reference, it is reasonable to ask whether they have made a genuine effort to identify its source.

A reverse image search. Tracing the earliest available upload. Checking the photographer or artist’s website. Looking for a signature or watermark. Searching the image alongside relevant names or keywords. These steps can sometimes take only a few minutes. And that small amount of research can make the difference between unknowingly referencing another artist’s work and knowingly engaging with it. That distinction matters.

Inspiration is a fundamental part of art. Artists have always studied, referenced and responded to the work of others. But inspiration does not erase authorship.

Then AI enters the equation

There is another complication in this story: AI-generated imagery has changed how people perceive images online.

We now live in a visual environment where people regularly question whether an image was made by a human or generated by artificial intelligence. That uncertainty creates a new problem for artists. What happens when a human-made artwork is incorrectly labelled as AI?

The artist loses more than recognition. Their authorship can be questioned altogether.

And if that incorrectly labelled image continues to circulate without the artist’s name, another creator encountering it later may have little reason to know who originally made it.The cycle continues.

Who is responsible for preserving attribution?

It is tempting to place all the responsibility on the person who ultimately uses an image.

Creators absolutely have a responsibility to do their due diligence. But they aren't the only part of the ecosystem.Platforms influence how images are displayed and circulated. Algorithms can separate images from their original posts. Users repost without context. Screenshots remove captions. Search engines surface images independently of their creators.

At every stage, attribution can be lost.

So perhaps the bigger question isn't simply:

“Who copied whom?” It is: What happens when art moves faster than its attribution?

A more responsible digital culture

There are simple things creators can do.

Before referencing an image found online:

• Find the source.

• Identify the artist.

• Check whether the image has been reposted from somewhere else.

• Credit the original creator.

• And when reproduction is involved, find out whether permission is required.

None of this means artists should stop looking at, learning from or responding to the work they encounter online. It means we acknowledge that an image has a history and that history includes a person who made it.

For Caribbean creatives in particular, this conversation matters. Our work is increasingly visible across borders and platforms. That visibility creates opportunities, but it also creates new challenges around ownership, attribution and how our creative contributions are documented and remembered.

The goal shouldn't be to make art less accessible. It should be to make the people behind the art harder to erase. Because artists deserve to travel with their work. And when the name disappears, the artist can disappear with it.