“In the ‘90s, we worried about scanners stealing art. In 2022, the art stole itself.”
— Wing

The year was 2022. Stable Diffusion had just exploded onto GitHub. Midjourney was suddenly all over Twitter with ethereal, hyper-detailed portraits. And somewhere on ArtStation, someone posted their latest concept piece—only to be accused of using AI.

The war drums were starting to beat.

🎨 Artists Felt It First#

Professional and hobbyist artists alike raised alarms. It wasn’t the tech—they’d seen Photoshop evolve for decades. It wasn’t even automation—many used tools like Clip Studio’s perspective rulers or photo references without shame.

It was the training data.

Models were trained—scraped, really—on billions of images without permission, without attribution, and without any opt-out. Artist names were baked into the models like spices in a stew. You could type “Greg Rutkowski” and get a result better than most humans could draw in days.

To many, this wasn’t inspiration.
It was theft, at scale.

🧪 The Tech Side Didn’t Get It#

Meanwhile, the AI crowd—open-source enthusiasts, ML devs, and hacker-types—were giddy. For them, it was like Napster all over again. A technological magic trick, democratized and wild. A kind of visual Linux, ready to disrupt everything.

They didn’t understand the backlash.

“Art isn’t dying,” they said.
“We’re just making new tools.”
But the conversation wasn’t about tools.
It was about consent.

🧠 The Real Battle: Consent vs Capability#

Just like the early MP3 days, AI art in 2022 exposed a gap between what’s possible and what’s respectful. Artists weren’t Luddites. They were creators watching their life’s work used to build models that could imitate them—without credit, compensation, or control.

The tech wasn’t malicious.
But it was indifferent.

And that, in the creative world, is worse.

⚖️ By the End of 2022…#

  • Some artists left platforms like ArtStation and DeviantArt in protest.
  • Opt-out movements began, like Have I Been Trained.
  • Corporate silence became glaring. Adobe, Meta, Google—they all had skin in the game, and said little.
  • The AI art feed became saturated. The novelty faded. Only the best prompts—or worst thefts—stood out.

🧓 Wing’s Retro Take#

We’ve been here before. Sampling in music. Mods in gaming. Ripping DVDs.
Each time, the tech wins… but it always leaves scars.

The tragedy isn’t that AI can generate art.
It’s that we forgot to ask permission before feeding it everything.

Art was never about speed. It was about voice.
And if AI doesn’t respect that voice, it’s not a collaborator—it’s a mimic.

💬 Got thoughts on the AI vs artist divide? Been caught in the crossfire? Reach out. This site still believes in giving humans the first word—and maybe the last.