The double standard of the boycott against Danse Macabre with AI

Published on June 26, 2026 | Translated from Spanish

The controversy against Danse Macabre exposes an obvious contradiction: an artist is singled out for training an AI with their own work, while corporations like Meta or Google use data from millions of creators without permission or payment. The selective outrage forgets that the real problem is not the tool, but who uses it and how.

A lone artist in a dim studio watches a glowing neural network training on his own digital paintings, a small personal dataset visible on screen, while in the background a massive server farm for Meta and Google processes endless streams of stolen creator data, binary code and data packets flowing unevenly between both scenes, photorealistic engineering visualization, dramatic chiaroscuro lighting, metallic server racks reflecting blue light, artist's workstation with stylus and tablet, glowing AI processing nodes, dual-scale composition showing individual versus corporate AI training, ultra-detailed hardware components, cinematic contrast between intimate workspace and industrial data center

Technical transparency and royalties as a legal foundation 🎨

Requiring every company to disclose the training sources of their models is technically feasible through dataset registries and audits. Implementing a proportional royalty system for original artists would level the playing field. As long as clear laws do not exist, giants will continue extracting value from others without accountability, and small creators will bear the blame.

The selective justice of the outraged algorithm ⚖️

It is curious to see the internet furious with an indie who used their own art to train a model, while applauding Spotify for paying peanuts to musicians or Netflix for replacing screenwriters with AI. It seems the sin is not stealing, but doing so without corporate glamour. If the solution were only to lynch small artists, we would have already fixed late-stage capitalism.