Simon Stålenhag

Simon Stålenhag (born 1984) is a Swedish artist, musician, and author whose paintings of rural Sweden haunted by giant robots, derelict machines, and looming dystopian tech defined a genre of retro-futurism. His narrative art books Tales from the Loop (2014) and The Electric State (2018) became an Amazon TV series (2020) and a Netflix film by the The Russo Brothers (2025) respectively.

Mimicked by the machine

In August 2022, intellectual-property scholar Andres Guadamuz used Midjourney to generate images in Stålenhag’s unmistakable style and posted them to Twitter as a legal thought experiment. Stålenhag responded with a widely shared thread, reported by Wired: borrowing from other artists, he wrote, is a “cornerstone of a living, artistic culture,” but what he hated about AI art was what it revealed about the tech industry’s vision for creative work. He described the technology as one that takes lifetimes of work by artists, without consent, and turns it into a product whose profits enrich a wealthy few — likening the output to industrial pastry made from other people’s labor.

His objection is notable for what it is not: Stålenhag told commentators he did not regard the mimicry as plagiarism, had no intention of suing anyone, and even allowed that such tools might be useful for exploring ideas. His hostility is aimed at the political economy of generative AI — scraped training data, concentrated profits, and a culture happy to settle for imitation — rather than at any individual user.

The episode made him one of the most-cited voices of the 2022 artist backlash, alongside Greg Rutkowski, whose name had become the most-used artist prompt in Stable Diffusion that same summer.