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AI see what you did there: Delhi artist’s work sparks plagiarism debate
Updated On: 19 October, 2025 09:16 AM IST | Mumbai | Sucheta Chakraborty
An AI-fuelled plagiarism controversy around the work of a Delhi-based artist has thrown up questions of authenticity, ethics, artistic fulfilment, and vulnerability
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Artist Krishna Bala Shenoi’s Cottonboy. Pic/Instagram @krishnabalashenoi; (right) Abhay Sehgal’s All for One features Cottonboy as one of the elements
A few weeks ago, artist and illustrator Krishna Bala Shenoi learnt that an artwork he had made in 2021 had turned up on a painting by Delhi-based contemporary artist Abhay Sehgal. Shenoi’s Cottonboy was, as the Bengaluru-based artist has noted in a now viral Instagram post, “transplanted pixel for pixel onto [Sehgal’s] canvas”.
This isn’t the first time his cotton candy boy has been used elsewhere without permission, Shenoi tells us. Followers have apprised him in the past of the painting appearing as T-shirt prints and even as a mural in a restaurant. “I’m not litigious and I have let it go,” he tells us. “Even with Sehgal’s work [titled All for One], I saw that my painting was a small part of his collage and didn’t initially feel transgressed upon… What bothered me this time around was the caption. It had him talking about it as if it was a painting.”
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