When niche digital art is stripped of its context and rebranded for mass consumption, the loss isn't just legal. It's cultural. We've seen this happen a dozen times with internet aesthetics, but the current wave of AI training sets is doing it at a scale that feels different. It isn't just "inspiration" when a model swallows ten thousand images from a specific, tiny community of artists to produce a generic "style" filter for the masses. I've spent years watching how tools evolve, and usually, there's a period of adaptation where the humans and the software find a middle ground. But here, the gap is widening. We're trading the intent and the history behind a piece of work for the sake of a prompt that takes three seconds to run. It's efficient, sure. It's also kind of depressing. The real problem is that the people building these models often treat the training data like a raw commodity. They see pixels and patterns, not ...