Last weekend, Hollie Mengert woke up to an email pointing her to a Reddit thread, the first of several messages from friends and fans, informing the Los Angeles-based illustrator and character designer that she was now an AI model.The post sparked a debate in the comments about the ethics of fine-tuning an AI on the work of a specific living artist, even as new fine-tuned models are posted daily.How did Hollie Mengert feel about her art being used in this way, and what did MysteryInc152 think about the explosive reaction to it?Since its release in late August, I’ve written about the explosive creativity and complex ethical and legal debates unleashed by the open-source release of Stable Diffusion, explored the billions of images it was trained on, and talked about the data laundering that shields corporations like Stability AI from accountability.It knows that Garfield’s an orange cartoon cat and Danny DeVito’s general features and body shape, but not well enough to recognizably render either of them."