Hollie Mengert

Hollie Mengert is a Los Angeles-based illustrator and character designer who has worked professionally since 2011, illustrating children’s books and creating character art for clients including Disney and Penguin Random House. Her warm, rounded, animation-inflected style made her a respected working artist — and then, involuntarily, a test case for the ethics of AI style cloning.

Invasive diffusion

In late October 2022, a mechanical engineering student in Canada fine-tuned a Stable Diffusion model on 32 of Mengert’s illustrations — including client work for Disney and Penguin Random House — and released it publicly on Reddit under her name, letting anyone generate “Hollie Mengert-style” images on demand. Technologist Andy Baio documented the case in November 2022 in a widely shared Waxy.org piece, “Invasive Diffusion,” that became one of the defining artifacts of the AI-art debate: a named, working artist confronting the person who cloned her style, who conceded when asked about consent, “Yeah, that’s… that’s a different… I guess it all depends.”

Mengert never sued and never led a campaign; her power in the debate comes from the plainness of her objection — her name was attached to a machine she never approved. The story circulated alongside the cases of Greg Rutkowski and Sarah Andersen and helped galvanize the artist backlash that produced the December 2022 ArtStation protest and the 2023 class-action suits against Stability AI.