RJ Palmer

RJ Palmer is an American concept artist and creature designer best known for his hyper-realistic Pokémon illustrations — a fan project so distinctive that it led to his hiring as a concept artist on Legendary’s 2019 film Detective Pikachu. He has also done design work for Ubisoft. In August 2022, days after Stable Diffusion’s public release, he became one of the first working artists to sound the alarm.

“This thing wants our jobs”

On August 13, 2022, Palmer posted a viral thread warning that a new generation of image AI could produce work that “looks 100% human made” and, unlike earlier novelty generators, was “explicitly trained on current working artists” — he pointed to a generated image that even tried to recreate the mangled logo of the artist it imitated. The thread, retweeted tens of thousands of times, crystallized the fear that generative AI was not a toy but a direct competitor built from artists’ own scraped portfolios.

Expanding on the thread to Kotaku later that month, Palmer was specific about the economics: he argued the tech would hurt entry-level artists first, since “speed is favoured over quality so often that a cleaned up, ‘good enough’ AI-generated image could suffice for a lot of needs,” and noted that small commissions from self-published authors are “how a lot of us got our start as professional artists.” Notably, he acknowledged there are “tremendous benefits to the tech for artists as well, which is part of why it’s such a headache.”

Palmer’s warning predated and helped fuel the wave that followed — the December 2022 ArtStation “No AI” protest joined by Lois van Baarle and the 2023 class-action lawsuit led by Karla Ortiz. He has continued to campaign against nonconsensual AI training in interviews and convention appearances since.