Every tool that mattered got called cheating first. I wrote that on X this summer, and AI is only the newest name on a very old list.

Since then I have been posting the list one tool at a time. It is at sixteen, and past a certain length the entries matter less than the shape. This issue is the shape, walked in order and grouped by what the complaint was actually about, with the dates kept so you can check me.

In 1494 a Benedictine abbot named Johannes Trithemius published a short book called In Praise of Scribes. His argument was that monks should keep copying manuscripts by hand. Parchment would last a thousand years and printed paper would not. The labor of copying was itself devotion, and a copyist learned a text in a way a reader never could.

He had the book printed, on a press in Mainz, so it could reach more monasteries than his copyists could supply.

I do not think he was a hypocrite. The words on the page were the same either way. What he was defending was what the copyist's hands had been doing while the page was made. It is the first entry on the list and the whole list in miniature.

In 1859 Charles Baudelaire reviewed the Paris Salon and gave photography a paragraph. He called it art's most mortal enemy and said it should go back to being the humble servant of the sciences, like printing and shorthand. The objection was not that photographs looked bad. It was that a man pointed a box at a scene and the box did the looking.

Three years later a French court ruled that photographs could be protected as works of art. A group of painters, Ingres among them, petitioned against the ruling. Photography was a mechanical process, they argued, and could not be art by definition, whatever the picture showed.

The pictures were fine. The argument was about the hand that did not draw them.

This is the longest group. For most of the twentieth century the complaint kept its form and changed only the machine.

John Philip Sousa published an essay in 1906 called The Menace of Mechanical Music. He predicted the phonograph would end amateur music-making in the home, because nobody would sing if a machine could sing for them. He gave us the phrase "canned music." The fear was music in a room with no musician.

In 1930 the American Federation of Musicians ran a national ad campaign against recorded sound in movie theaters. Sound film had arrived in 1927 and theater orchestras were being let go. The ads showed a robot at the conductor's stand and asked the public whether they wanted living music or a machine. The public went to the movies.

In May 1982 the British Musicians' Union passed a motion to ban synthesizers, drum machines and any electronic device that could imitate a conventional instrument. The fear was an orchestra pit run by technicians. The ban was barely enforced and was not lifted until 1997.

Queen printed "and nobody played synthesiser" on the sleeve of their first album in 1973, and kept some version of that line until 1980, when they used one on The Game and the line came off. The credit was a badge. It meant every sound on the record had been made by a person's hands, and it meant that was worth saying.

The Mellotron got there first, in 1963. Press a key and a tape strip of a real flautist plays a note. It was a room of session musicians in a box, which was exactly the complaint.

And in May 1966 in Manchester, someone in the crowd shouted "Judas" at Bob Dylan because there was an amplifier between him and the room. The songs were his and the band was the band. The complaint was about the electricity.

The second half of the list changes subject. The complaint stops being about the hand that did not do the work and starts being about the source the work was taken from.

In 1981 the British record industry launched Home Taping Is Killing Music, with a cassette-and-crossbones logo. In 1982 Jack Valenti of the Motion Picture Association told a congressional committee that the VCR was to the film industry what the Boston strangler was to a woman alone at home. By 1986 Americans were spending more on videocassettes than on movie tickets.

In 1988 the musician Mtume said on New York radio that sampling was not music, that it was closer to theft. Stetsasonic answered him with a record arguing that sampling was how a new generation had found the jazz records in the first place. The record makes the argument better than I can, so I will not quote either side.

Three years later a federal judge opened his opinion in Grand Upright v. Warner with the words "Thou shalt not steal." Biz Markie had used an uncleared sample. After that ruling every sample got cleared or got cut, and the collage records of the previous five years became something nobody could afford to make.

This group is different from the first. Nobody accused the home taper of not working hard enough. The complaint was about who got paid, which is a real complaint, and the industry solved it with licensing rather than by getting rid of the cassette.

The last group is where I have to concede something.

In February 1982 National Geographic ran a cover of the pyramids at Giza and, to fit a horizontal photograph on a vertical cover, moved one pyramid closer to the other. The editor defended it as the retroactive repositioning of the photographer. The magazine is still being asked about it.

In 1998 Cher released "Believe" with Auto-Tune set hard enough that the vocal stepped between notes like a keyboard. The producers at first named a different piece of gear to keep the trick to themselves. When it came out, the word was cheating.

In 1985 Andy Warhol drew Debbie Harry live on an Amiga at the computer's launch in New York. He used a fill tool. He had heard for twenty years that silkscreens were not painting, and the fill tool was the same argument with a mouse.

And in the early 1940s Les Paul fixed pickups to a four-by-four pine post and bolted the halves of a hollow body to the sides so it looked like a guitar. Gibson turned it down. The name that stuck to it there was the broomstick with pickups. Ten years later Leo Fender's slab-bodied Telecaster got called a canoe paddle by people who made guitars for a living. I match necks to solid bodies every day. The canoe paddle won.

Here is the concession. Photoshop, when it arrived in 1990, was not called cheating. It was called fake, and it was called a lie. The difference matters. A lie is about the viewer being deceived. Cheating is about the maker skipping labor. The pyramids belong in the first list, and so does every deepfake you have seen. Those are not the drum machine complaint, and pretending they are would make my list worse.

Take the truth cases out and read the rest. The complaint is about the labor, the hand that did not draw and the musician who was not in the room. It is never about the result. The 1862 petition did not say the photographs were ugly, and nobody today says the Telecaster sounds like a canoe paddle.

And every entry on the list is now an ordinary instrument. The people who use them do not think of themselves as cheating, and nobody asks them to.

I am not claiming AI is the same as the synthesizer. I do not know how that argument ends. I am claiming the argument against it is the same argument, word for word, and that argument has a record.

There is an honest version of the complaint and it deserves to be separated from the noise. It is about attribution and training data. The models learned from work that people made, and most of those people were not asked or paid. That is the home taping complaint, not the Mellotron complaint, and in that group the answer was never "ban the cassette." It was a licensing system that took a decade to build. I think that is roughly where this ends too, and "it's cheating" is a worse answer than the question deserves. So is the answer the tool companies usually give.

If your list has an entry mine does not, reply with the tool and the year. I will add it to the thread.

The tools are all still here. So are the people who said they should not be. Nobody remembers which side they were on.

Glenn Williams is a luthier at PRS Guitars and a generative AI artist working across image, video, and animation. As an Adobe Firefly Ambassador and a creative partner with Topaz Labs and Runway ML, he explores where photographic precision meets the strange. He writes The Render, a newsletter on AI creative practice, and produces Stor-AI Time, a series of AI-animated folktale adaptations. See more of his work at glennwilliams.net.