Shop stealing my original artwork, altering it by AI and marketing it as their own.
I've been running an Etsy shop doing commission work for many years. It's been pretty successful, but with the rise of cheap AI generated slop all over the marketplace, obviously my orders have plummeted.
I've kind of made peace with this (although not with the fact that AI slop is not only rampant but seemingly entirely unregulated on Etsy), but I recently discovered that somebody took nearly every single listing photo from one of my listings, ran my hand drawn art through AI, and used the altered images as their own listing photos.
Most of the images have been changed enough that I can't claim ownership of the altered versions, but one of them contains a part that has remained entirely unchanged (part of a comic book cover design).
I already reported this through Etsy's reporting portal, but it was rejected. I also messaged the seller and told them to immediately remove my work and never touch it again (this part I obviously can't actually police, but I'm appalled that they're directly feeding my work into some AI system by running it through this shit), needless to say, to no avail.
I've now reached out to Etsy's legal team via email with more evidence, hoping that an actual person will review my claim, but if that doesn't work out either, is there anything else I could do to get this removed?
At this point, I don't even care about the lost sales anymore, I've had enough of Etsy and its temufication with its dropshippers and AI “artists” flooding the market so it was only a matter of time for me to leave the platform, but this is genuinely infuriating, and I want my work immediately removed and more importantly never associated with this person's shitty AI-slop shop.