Her style isn't original and unique to her from the art world perspective. There are dozens of people who draw exactly like this, and hundreds who can draw like it and just choose not to. This is not a criticism against her personally - it's practically impossible to have a truly unique style in this world with millions of other artists.
The fact that pictures in that style can be meaningfully described by her brand is only a result of the success of her personal branding effort. She kept a consistent style, she promoted her work, established a website, personal portfolio, publicised her career. She didn't invent this style, but made an effort to claim it as hers. This is a regular path for an artist. It didn't just happen to her like a robbery against her will - it took years of effort for her to establish her name like that in the public consciousness, culture and search engines. Stable Diffusion just builds out of those things.
If this artist didn't exist, the style would still exist in works of other artists. It just wouldn't have this useful tag of her name. We would have to put something like Modern-colorful-flat-vector-cute-disney-textured-cartoon-illustration to get the same results. But since she claimed this style as hers, we can just use her name to effectively describe it. I don't see it as a tragedy, I see it as a success story.
Thanks for the very nuanced take. I think part of the reaction is on the tension between these years of efforts to embrace and establish this style as hers, have it associated with her name; versus a project emerging from nowhere to take that name and art style and run away with it.
On a factual/legal level these are nothing burger events, and we'll probably forget about it if two months from now she has a big boost to her career. But I'm kinda skeptical much good will come out of this for her. In our worlds it would close to raising an open source project for a decade, have it succeed and shine in the world with some support money coming in, to then get it cloned by AWS and you're left wondering what you'll do next. This is part of the game, but it sure sucks.
The fact that pictures in that style can be meaningfully described by her brand is only a result of the success of her personal branding effort. She kept a consistent style, she promoted her work, established a website, personal portfolio, publicised her career. She didn't invent this style, but made an effort to claim it as hers. This is a regular path for an artist. It didn't just happen to her like a robbery against her will - it took years of effort for her to establish her name like that in the public consciousness, culture and search engines. Stable Diffusion just builds out of those things.
If this artist didn't exist, the style would still exist in works of other artists. It just wouldn't have this useful tag of her name. We would have to put something like Modern-colorful-flat-vector-cute-disney-textured-cartoon-illustration to get the same results. But since she claimed this style as hers, we can just use her name to effectively describe it. I don't see it as a tragedy, I see it as a success story.