LavenderTowne
Illustrator & YouTuber
Cartoonist Haley Newsome — LavenderTowne to her 2M+ YouTube subscribers — is one of art-YouTube’s most visible AI critics, poisoning her own drawings with Nightshade and answering an AI clone of her style with a hand-drawn tutorial.
In her words
AI image generators only work on the stolen labor and precious personal artwork of human beings.
There are so many tiny decisions that you make when you’re writing a story or making an image that your subconscious is leaking through and putting in texture and soul that you’re not even consciously aware of.
As a bonus, drawing it yourself won’t require catastrophic damage to the environment.
Biography
LavenderTowne is the pen name of American cartoonist Haley Newsome, whose candy-colored horror-tinged drawing tutorials and character-design challenges have drawn more than two million YouTube subscribers. Her webcomic “Unfamiliar,” a witchy small-town comedy running on Tapas since 2016, has logged over 30 million views, was collected in print by Andrews McMeel in 2022, and earned a 2024 Eisner Award nomination for Best Webcomic.
From curiosity to counterattack
Newsome’s first brush with image generators was playful — a November 2022 video redrawing AI-generated “original characters” by hand. She later called that experiment a mistake, warning that redraw content may inadvertently help train the machines. By December 2023 she was cataloguing “The Worst Types of AI ‘Art,’” and in October 2024 she escalated: in “Making Poisoned Art to Punish AI Thieves” (2.5 million views) she ran her drawings through Nightshade and seeded them online under popular prompt tags — and her own name — to corrupt any scraper that ingested them. In the same video she condemned prompt guides that tell beginners to type “by Greg Rutkowski,” calling it embarrassing that AI communities teach newcomers to imitate Greg Rutkowski and Hayao Miyazaki — creators who despise the technology.
If these generators are really doing nothing wrong and they’re not stealing from us, then they won’t be hurt by these poison attacks. It’s only if they start to steal that they will be attacked.
When commenters branded her a Luddite, her March 2025 rebuttal “The AI ‘Artists’ Are Mad at Me” pointed out that she builds her own PCs and does game jams for fun — her objection is theft, not technology. She draws a sharp line: fans drawing in her style is appreciation; generating AI images from her art is “more like tracing and theft.” After hostile prompters trained a LoRA on her artwork in 2025, she responded with a step-by-step tutorial teaching anyone to imitate her style by hand, selling posters to benefit the campaign group Stop Killer Robots. She likens AI-inevitability talk to NFT hype and argues generative AI remains an investor-subsidized bubble.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/lavendertowne