What Does This Mean?
Visual art created or substantially assisted by generative AI image tools such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E, ranging from prompt-driven one-off images to complex multi-step workflows combining AI generation with traditional editing.
EXPLAINER
Vox · original source ↗
EXPLAINER
WSJ Podcasts · original source ↗
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REAL-WORLD EXAMPLE
"That whole album cover was AI art — Midjourney base image, then hand-touched in Photoshop for a week."
LORE & ORIGIN
AI image generation broke into mainstream use in 2022: Midjourney's early public versions rolled out from February 2022, OpenAI's DALL-E 2 drew wide attention that spring, and Stable Diffusion's public open-weights release on August 22, 2022 let developers build countless local tools, apps, and communities around it almost overnight. Within months, AI-generated images were showing up across social media, advertising, and publishing, sparking ongoing debates over copyright, authorship, and the displacement of human illustrators that continue into 2026.
By 2026, the underlying models have improved to the point that outputs are often difficult to visually distinguish from professional photography or traditional digital art, and major platforms (Midjourney, OpenAI's ChatGPT-integrated image tools, Google's Gemini, Adobe's design tools) increasingly build AI image generation directly into mainstream creative workflows rather than treating it as a standalone novelty.
EQUIVALENT CONCEPTS IN OTHER LANGUAGES
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