AI Can Generate Images, But It Can’t Make Art: Why Human Judgment Always Wins

Generative AI can produce an image in seconds. It can mimic styles, combine references, and generate visual output at a scale no human can match on speed alone.

It cannot decide what to draw. It needs a human to prompt it.

It cannot look at a written scene and translate it into a sequence of panels that control pacing, emotion, and the reader’s eye movement across a comic book page. It cannot choose the camera angle that makes a moment dramatic or poetic. It cannot use negative space as a storytelling device. It cannot place a figure in the lower third of a panel because the emptiness above them is the point or waiting for lettering.

These are not technical skills. They are judgment calls. And judgment is the product of decades of drawing, reading, observing, failing, and drawing again.

I've watched this debate closely for the last two years. I've written about the legal cases (Bartz v. Anthropic, Thomson Reuters v. Ross, the Disney/Midjourney fallout). The law is slowly catching up to the technology. But the more important argument is not legal. It's creative.

The value of an illustrator was never the labor of moving a tool across paper, canvas, or a screen. The value was always in knowing where to put the lines and why. That is not something a prompt can do. Not because the technology isn't good enough yet, but because it requires a human being who has lived inside the creative world long enough to make decisions that a model trained on scraped images simply cannot mimic.

I'm not betting on the tool. I'm believing in the artist who knows how to use it.

Just create.™

Stop Mindless Copying: The 4-Step Method

 I previously gave some book recommendations. https://www.justcreate.net/2016/11/a-word-about-books.html

The books by George Bridgman, Burne Hogarth, and Andrew Loomis are the absolute gold standard for anatomy, and having these as your go-to sets up a firm foundation. If you are serious about building your technical skills, here are some equally highly-regarded, industry-standard books for the other core disciplines to round out my recommendation list.

Color Theory and Light

• Color and Light: A Guide for the Realist Painter by James Gurney. This is universally considered the modern bible to understand light and color. Gurney breaks down and analyzes complex optical phenomena (like subsurface scattering, atmospheric perspective, and reflected light) into highly accessible, practical lessons. It’s essential for anyone working in color, whether traditional or digital.

• Interaction of Color by Josef Albers. For a more academic, foundational dive into how colors affect one another, this is a classic. It’s less about painting techniques and more about training the eye to understand color relativity, making it a great recommendation for students who want to deeply understand color theory.

Perspective

• How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination by Scott Robertson and Thomas Bertling. This is the definitive text for technical perspective. It is dense and challenging, making it perfect for students who really want to master spatial construction, grids, and rendering objects accurately in 3D space.

• Framed Perspective (Vol. 1 & Vol. 2) by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. If you are leaning more toward dynamic illustration, storyboarding, or sequential art, these books are incredible. They focus on how to use perspective to create dramatic, compelling shots and place characters convincingly within environments.

• Perspective Made Easy by Ernest R. Norling. For absolute beginners who might be intimidated by Robertson’s technical depth, this is the best starting point. It simplifies the core concepts of horizon lines and vanishing points without becoming overwhelming.

Composition and Visual Storytelling

• Framed Ink: Drawing and Composition for Visual Storytellers by Marcos Mateu-Mestre. This is a masterclass in composition, focusing heavily on how to use light, shadow, and framing to direct the viewer’s eye and evoke emotion. It’s particularly useful for anyone interested in comic art, illustration, or visual development, showing how to compose shots with real impact and energy.

• Picture This: How Pictures Work by Molly Bang. This is a deceptively simple book that uses cut-out shapes to explain the emotional psychology behind composition. It’s a brilliant resource to recommend for understanding why certain compositions feel balanced, tense, or calm on a fundamental, abstract level.

A Modern Addition for Anatomy

• Figure Drawing: Design and Invention by Michael Hampton. Since I’ve already recommended the classics, this is a fantastic modern supplement to keep in your back pocket. It bridges the gap between Loomis’s constructive approach and Bridgman’s focus on interlocking masses. It’s for teaching students how to simplify the figure into dynamic, easily understandable volumes.

These should give you a well-rounded curriculum.

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I’ve spent my adult life illustrating; the mechanics have become pure muscle memory. Translating my teenage instinct into an organized framework is exactly the pivot from student to educator. What seemed like "just copying" to my teenage brain was actually a highly effective, intuitive form of reverse-engineering.

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For beginners, unstructured copying often leads to mindless tracing where they capture the final lines but miss the underlying forms. When someone asks how to get the most out of these dense books, they are really asking for a repeatable learning framework.

​

Here is a structured, step-by-step method, often called the “Iterative Study” or "Read-Recall-Apply” method.

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The Art Book Study Framework

1. Read for the 'Why', Not Just the 'How':Keep the pencil down at first.

Read a single chapter or section without drawing anything. If you are looking at Loomis’s head construction, you need to understand the logic of the cranium sphere and the jaw plane before you try to replicate the lines.

2. The Analytical Copy (Master Study): Copying to understand, not to produce a pretty picture.

Now you pick up the pencil and copy the drawings directly from the book. The goal isn’t a perfect replica, but to recreate the artist’s process. If Bridgman is showing interlocking wedges for the torso, the student should be actively thinking about those 3D volumes as you draw them, rather than just copying 2D outlines.

3. The Memory Test: This is where actual learning happens.

This is the most key step beginners miss: close the book. Then try to draw the exact same concept or diagram from memory. You will inevitably get stuck or make a mistake. Then open the book, compare your memory-drawing to the original, and use a red pen (or a different digital color) to correct your structural mistakes.

4. Application to Original Work: Proving the concept is internalized.

Finally, you need to take the principle you just learned and apply it to a completely original drawing without looking at the reference. If you just learned Hogarth’s foreshortened arms, you should try drawing a character of your own design throwing a punch toward the camera.

A key piece of advice: Art books are reference manuals, not novels. You don’t read them front-to-back once and graduate. You study a specific mechanism (like the mechanics of the knee), practice it until it sticks, and then put the book back on the shelf until you hit your next plateau.

I get a piece of the action if you buy a book from my links.

Just create.™

Where Art Schools Fail: Why Passionate Creatives Must Learn the Business Side

art by Howard Simpson

 I've been drawing since I was 2 years old, according to my mom. I made a conscious decision to keep drawing because I like telling stories and reading comic books. I committed myself to it in the fifth grade when I saw the positive response it got from other people.

I did not start drawing to make money. I didn't start drawing to have a career or support a family. Drawing is like breathing to me. I would die without it.

Most people have jobs to pay the bills. I have a career, not a job. I draw whether I am paid or not. Getting paid is icing on the cake. I never understand the question "How do you stay motivated?" because I have never needed motivation. This is a passion that burns deep down inside me and has never gone away.

Which is precisely why the business side matters so much.

When you love something this deeply, you owe it to yourself to protect it with structure. With math. With clear limits around what your work is worth. Because the alternative is letting clients set your value for you. And they will almost always set it lower than you deserve, not because they are bad people (well, some of them are) but because you let them.

Here's where I feel schools fail art students. Basic business courses are not a requirement as part of the curriculum and they should be.

The art is sacred. The business protects the art.

Just create.™

How My First Hollywood Gig Humiliated Me And Revolutionized My Pricing

Photo by Luan Fonseca for Unsplash

On my first Hollywood feature film job, I was hired to design a set. A talk show set for one of the characters. Real production. Real budget. Real stakes.

They asked me for my fee.

I had been freelancing for quite a few years at that point. I had the portfolio. I had the client list. I had done the work for agencies, publishers, and entertainment companies. I was not new.

I quoted them a few hundred dollars.

There was a long pause on the phone. Then the producer (I think he was tired) said they would give me $5,000.

Five thousand dollars. For a job I had priced at a few hundred.

I did not feel happy. I felt humiliated. Not because they lowballed me, but because I had lowballed MYSELF. I had been doing it for years and didn't even know. Every quote I had ever given was a guess dressed up as confidence. And clients could feel it, which is probably why the producer sounded exhausted when he corrected me.

That moment permanently changed how I think about pricing. The problem was never confidence. The problem was math. I had never sat down and worked through the actual economics of a deal. The time, the costs, the rights, the usage, the territory, the exclusivity. None of it. I was pricing feelings, not deals.

I spent the next several years building a system to make sure I would never guess again. That system eventually became The Pricing Verdict. 

You don't have a pricing problem. You have a math problem.

Just create.™

 

Faceless Art Tutorials: Letting the Work Speak for Itself on YouTube

I have been running a YouTube tutorial channel for years and I have never shown my face on it. Not once.

People ask about this more than you'd expect. The assumption is that a faceless channel is hiding something. That you need a personality on screen to build trust. That the algorithm punishes you for it.

Here's what I've learned: when you teach someone how to draw hair, they don't need to see your face. They need to see the process. The work is the authority. The process is the content. The marks on the page (digital or otherwise) are doing the teaching, not my expressions.

There is a long tradition of this in art instruction. The camera points down at the paper. The voice explains what's happening and why. The student watches the lines appear and learns from the decisions being made in real time.

I'm not against showing my face. I'm indifferent to it. The art does the talking. That has worked for Bridgman's pencils, for Loomis' books, for every anatomy reference that changed how I draw. None of them needed a personality to convince me the information was valuable.

The work either teaches or it doesn't. Everything else is packaging.

Just create.™

 

The Freelance Mistake Costing You Thousands: Usage Rights vs. Hourly Rates

Most artists quote their fee based on time. How many hours will this take? What's my hourly rate? Multiply. Send the invoice.

That covers labor. It does not cover what you are actually giving away.

When a client hires you, they are not only buying hours of your hands moving. They are buying (or should be buying) a specific set of rights to what your hands produce. Usage rights. Licensing terms. Exclusivity windows. Geographic restrictions. Duration of use. Buyout provisions.

Each one of those has a dollar value. Each one changes the shape of the deal. A logo used on one local pop-up for 6 months is a fundamentally different product than the same logo used globally across all media in perpetuity.

The hours are identical. The deals are not even close.

Most artists price the hours. Professionals price the deal.

If you have never structured a quote around usage, licensing, territory, and sole rights, you are leaving real money on the table. Not small money. The kind of money that compounds across every project you do for the rest of your career.

This is what I built The Pricing Verdict to solve - https://abbadabba.com/verdict/ Not a calculator (calculators do math on inputs). It's a system that walks you through the full economic shape of any deal, so you stop giving away the parts of the job that actually carry the most value.

Just create.™

copyright © 2026 Howard Simpson

 

Why Creative Professionals Lose Money (And How to Fix Your Pricing)

I have worked for Fortune 500 companies and a long list of advertising agencies over the years. In all that time, across every type of client from corporate to mom & pop, I have noticed one pattern that never changes.

Artists apologize for their rates.

Not with words, necessarily. With behavior. They flinch when they say the number. They rush to explain how they calculated it. They offer discounts before anyone asks. They pad the conversation with justifications that nobody requested.

Lawyers don't do this. Accountants don't do this. The electrician who rewired my kitchen did not hand me a spreadsheet showing why he charges what he charges. He told me the number. I said yes or no. That was the entire negotiation.

But artists? We turn pricing into a confessional. And the client can feel it. They can feel the doubt. With some clients, that doubt becomes leverage they didn't even have to ask for. With other clients, they ask for discounts and low rates because they already know they can chew artists down. Chum is in the water.

The shift is simple (not easy, but simple): stop negotiating with your own feelings. Know your number before you pick up the phone. Know it cold, with the math already done, so that when the moment comes, you can state it the way a professional states it.

Done

Just create.™

copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

What a $1,000 Plumber Bill Can Teach Artists About Pricing

A factory machine broke down. Management called a specialist. The plumber walked in, listened to the sound of the machine, and tapped a single pipe with a small hammer.

The machine came back to life, then he handed over a bill for $1,000.

The manager wanted an itemized invoice. So the plumber rewrote it:

Tapping with a hammer: $1.

Knowing exactly where to hit: $999.

Artists hear this story and nod. Then they go back to charging by the hour. They go back to explaining to clients why they cost what they cost. They go back to showing their math like a student turning in homework.

Doctors don't do that. Lawyers don't do that. Plumbers definitely don't do that.

You are not selling your time. You are selling years of knowing exactly where to hit.

State the number. The number is the number.

Just create.™

art copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

Want to Ask an Art Teacher Anything? Skip the Awkward Email and Try This Free Tool

Commission in progress

 The Just Create Coach is my attempt to make my art teaching more accessible.

It’s free.

You can use it here:

https://www.abbadabba.com/freebies.html

It contains all the information in this blog and stuff in my brain. It's an easy resource to use.

That’s where much of my thinking lives. The coach I created just lets you ask questions instead of digging through posts, pages, and years of material. I used AI to make this interactive. 

For anyone who has an immediate reaction to AI, I understand the hesitancy. 

I’m using it to organize my own knowledge into a searchable tool. That’s the kind of thing I could not have afforded to build with custom programming. This is practical.

And it solves a real problem. People ask me if I’d talk to aspiring artists they know. I say yes. I give them my contact info. Almost nobody reaches out. I don’t think they’re lazy. I think they’re nervous. I was nervous too. So now they can ask the awkward question without the awkward email or phone call.

Try it.

If you stump it, tell me what you asked.

That helps me make it better.

Just create.™

art copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

One Way to Learn

 

I have so much unfinished art. I came across this unfinished piece while making room on my laptop and moving it to a backup drive.

At the time, I wanted to challenge myself in a few ways. I wanted to try that 1950s pin-up style. Second, I wanted to see if I could bring this washed-out photo to life. I also wanted to get better at hair. I've always disliked drawing hair, so I never put much effort into it.

I feel I was on my way to a good illustration. This didn't get finished, most likely, because I started it in-between jobs and then got busy with paying work. 

I must have done this around the time I created the hair video tutorial. https://youtu.be/Jd_4mjGH1u0?si=kZcGNC4yWvbhiFV_

The style I'm using looks like the 1950s. Not my usual technique. I created this video after not finding a hair tutorial that suited my needs. So I studied hair. I put what I learned into this video tutorial.

A lot of artists get stuck when they can't find a prepackaged way to learn. They want tips, tricks, and quick results. Not only did I learn more by studying hair on my own, but that knowledge is now mine. It's a part of me. I don't have to keep referring to someone else's tutorial.

Where did I learn? From hair stylists and barbers.

Seeing it now gives me an idea for something different I can do with this style. Won't get to it until next year. I have a big project I have to do first.

Just create.™

art and text copyright 2026 Howard Simpson

The Law is Catching Up to AI

The AI copyright debate is starting to leave the campfire stage.

For a while, it really was the Wild West. Models trained fast. Data was scraped faster. Artists were told this was just “learning” and “get used to it.”

That era is ending. Not because courts suddenly care about art. Because money, sourcing, and market harm are now on the record.

First, a baseline that still matters. The U.S. Copyright Office has ruled that AI-generated work, by itself, cannot be copyrighted. That decision limits ownership on the output side.

The real fight is upstream.

Bartz v. Anthropic put training data under a microscope. The case wasn’t about whether AI can learn. It was about what it learned from. Pirated shadow libraries, not legitimately licensed books.

The result was a $1.5 billion settlement. The largest copyright recovery in U.S. history.

The ruling split the issue into two:
Training may qualify as fair use in theory.
Using stolen data does not.

That distinction forced the settlement and sent a clear signal to the industry. Scraping without permission now has a price tag.

Then came Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence.

The court rejected the idea that copying copyright-protected works is harmless if the final output looks different. Intermediate copying still counts if you’re building a competing product. More importantly, the court recognized something creators have been saying for years.

Training data has market value. If there’s a licensing market, taking the data for free is not fair use.

California is now pushing that logic further with the bill AB-412, the AI Copyright Transparency Act. The bill would require AI developers to disclose what copyrighted works were used in training, and give creators legal recourse when companies refuse to answer.

This doesn’t shut AI down. It removes plausible deniability. For artists, this is a qualified win. Not a royalty system. Not full protection. But leverage.

The Wild West doesn’t end when everyone agrees. It ends when the rules start getting enforced.

 

Why I Don't Fear AI

 

Here’s why I don’t fear AI replacing what I do as an illustrator, storyboard and comic book artist.

AI can replace labor. It can’t replace an illustrator.

Not real ones. Not the ones who think, interpret, translate, and direct the eye with purpose.

Here’s why.

1. Illustrators don’t draw pictures. They shape meaning.
   Your process makes that clear. You read the script until the scene forms in your mind. You don’t start drawing until you see it. The mind is your first tool, not the pencil.
   AI doesn’t see a scene. It rearranges data. It doesn’t interpret subtext, pacing, emotional temperature, or intent. It simply imitates the surface.
2. Illustrators light a scene with purpose.
   You understand why a shadow traps a character’s emotion or why a hard edge focuses a reader’s eye. You’ve spent years observing how light bends around form and how it drives story.
   AI understands none of that. It renders “lighting style.” It doesn’t know why a character should be ominous in panel seven or contemplative in panel three in a graphic novel. Your mastery is rooted in the craft of storytelling, not aesthetics.
3. An illustrator makes choices. AI only outputs.
   Your thumbnails, your refusal to judge early sketches, your search for the one moment that carries emotional truth; these are decisions formed from training, taste, restraint, and experience.
   AI can’t choose with intention. It can’t feel when a composition is honest or when it cheats. It generates options. An illustrator creates meaning.
4. Illustrators bring lived history and influence to the page.
   Your lineage stretches from Windsor McCay to Jack Kirby, from Caravaggio to Alex Toth. You don’t mimic them. You absorb them. You understand why Kirby pushed perspective or why Caravaggio staged light the way he did. AI copies appearance without understanding lineage. It can’t synthesize tradition into something new.
5. Illustrators solve problems AI can’t see.
   Editors and Creative Directors hire illustrators for judgment. For pacing. For visual distinctness. For continuity. For deciding how the reader will move through a sequence of emotional beats.
   You understand the invisible mechanics: panel rhythm, line of action, silhouette clarity, balloon space, acting, and camera grammar.
   AI doesn’t know any of those rules. It imitates them when they are accidentally present in the data. It doesn’t apply them with intention, and it can’t troubleshoot a broken sequence.
6. Illustrators collaborate. AI doesn’t.
   A script is a conversation. You interpret, negotiate, push, question, and revise. You bring intelligence to the table. A collaborator.
   AI is a tool. It brings no perspective, no lived understanding, no creative friction. And friction is where good work comes from.
7. Illustrators create from identity.
   You don’t create for an audience.  Remember when you were drawing as a little kid.  You did that for yourself. Maybe you showed the really good ones to your mother. You create to stay alive. It’s breath. AI has no inner life to draw from. No unconscious to wrestle with. No inner child to reconnect to.
8. Illustrators bring value defined by time, cost, and experience.
   Your worth is not measured in hours but in your eye, your training, your storytelling instincts, your reliability, and your ability to solve visual problems no dataset understands. Your rates reflect that value.
   AI has no rate. It has no consequences. It has no accountability.
9. Illustrators evolve. AI repeats.
   You adapt to the story. You shift. You grow. You interpret.
   AI is static. A mirror of training data, not a mind that responds to the moment.
10. Illustrators create the work AI imitates.
    Without illustrators, AI has no dataset. It feeds on the very people it supposedly replaces. Remove the illustrators, and the machine starves.

AI can speed production. It can fill gaps. It can generate references, variations, and studies. It can serve the illustrator.

But it can’t be the illustrator. Because an illustrator isn’t the hand.

It’s the mind behind it. The taste. The judgment. The lived experience. The instinct sharpened by years of seeing the world with intention. That can’t be replaced.

Not by a model trained on pixels. Not by a prompt. Not by speed.
Only by another human who sees.

AI Isn’t the Problem

 Artists Forgetting Their Power Is

Artists being afraid of new technology isn’t new. We’ve been here more times than people want to admit.

When paint was literally pulled from the earth, that was considered the “real” way to work; then oil painting arrived. It looked like cheating. If you didn’t grind your own pigment and get clay under your fingernails, were you even an artist? It took centuries for people to stop arguing and use the tool.

Industrial paint production hit next. Synthetic pigments flooded the market. The traditionalists called them vulgar. Sound familiar?

Then came the collapsible paint tube. Nobody hated the tube itself. They hated what came inside it. Artists complained the paint wasn’t “pure” or “handmade” enough. The pattern keeps repeating.

Photography showed up in the 1800s and shook the whole foundation of painting. A device could capture reality faster and cleaner than any painter. Critics called it “the mortal enemy of art.” Painters either adapted or became historical footnotes. The ones who stayed around did it by changing how they painted, not by trying to beat the camera at its own game.

Duchamp dropped a urinal in a gallery in 1917 and forced the entire field to admit that ideas matter just as much as execution. People hated him for it. Conceptual art exists today because one guy said, “What if art isn’t what you think it is?”

Acrylic paint was considered cheap and plastic. Today it’s standard.

Digital took even more heat. Early computer graphics were mocked. “Cold.” “Sterile.” “Not real art.” The minute artists got tablets and styluses, we turned the whole thing on its head again. But not before years of resistance, accusations of cheating, and a lot of hand-wringing about what’s “real.”

And even now, people still yell, “If it’s digital, it doesn’t count.” Some folks act like using a mouse or code erases the artist’s hand.

Every wave follows the same script. The new tool arrives. Artists complain. Artists adapt. Artists create something new. The field expands. Then something else shows up.

AI is our latest version of this same anxiety.

And yes, we have a legitimate grievance this time. AI scraped from artists without consent or compensation. I’m angry right along with you. But pretending we can shove AI back in the bottle isn’t realistic. The horse didn’t just leave the barn. It galloped across three counties.

I’m working on something that may help, but even that will be a bandage, not a cure. The damage is done. So the real question becomes: what now?

When you look at the history of every single art upheaval, we adapt. We create something that didn’t exist before. That’s our actual superpower, not the brush, tablet, or software. Us.

So when I hear “AI is going to take my job,” I can’t accept that.

AI isn’t going to take your job. A person who learns how to use AI will take your job.

If you sit in your puddle of fear and hate, someone else will make the leap you refused to make. That’s the part artists don’t want to hear, but it’s the truth.

We’ve always thrived when we stop guarding the old gate and start building new doors.

In the 1990s, the artists who were on the bleeding edge hijacked the only software available and bent it to their will. That software was “Ye Olde Photoshoppe.” Photoshop was created for photographers to retouch photos, but look what we artists did! We perverted its Prime Directive to suit our own needs.

From here on out, I want to show you how to use AI as an ally instead of a rival, how to let it handle the boring work so you can get back to the real work. The creative work. The part only we can do.

If you’re open to it, stick around. I’ll walk you through how artists can use AI in ways that strengthen, not replace, what we do. Leave your comments and questions. We’ll navigate this together.

Just create™

Note* I used AI for this infographic because I was never good at putting these together. Let’s let it do something I don’t want to do. No one’s paying me for it.

Disney Isn’t Fighting AI

 

It’s Redrawing the Rules of Creativity

With apologies to Charles Schulz copyright 2026 H. Simpson

Disney isn’t trying to stop generative AI. It’s using lawsuits and licensing deals to redraw who gets to control it.

The real question isn’t whether AI can learn from art, but whether independent artists will be allowed inside the system once the corporations finish drawing the borders.

The Disney and Universal v. Midjourney lawsuit is not just another AI copyright dispute. It is a power struggle over who gets to set the rules for generative AI going forward.

Unlike earlier cases brought by individual artists, this one involves two of the largest IP holders on the planet. That matters. Disney and Universal are not more morally right; however, they have the leverage to force outcomes that smaller creators never could.

In June 2025, Disney (including Marvel and Lucasfilm) and Universal (including DreamWorks) filed suit against Midjourney in federal court. Their claim was blunt: Midjourney operates as a bottomless pit of plagiarism, producing near-perfect replicas of protected characters on demand.

Not “inspired by.” Not “loosely reminiscent.” Functionally interchangeable copies.

What the studios are alleging

The core allegations are straightforward.

Midjourney trained its models by scraping millions of copyrighted images and countless hours of film without licenses. The resulting system can generate Elsa, Yoda, Shrek, or Minions with minimal prompting. And by marketing that capability, the studios argue Midjourney is inducing users to infringe on copyright at scale.

This is not about a single image. It is about industrialized replication.

Midjourney’s response follows the now-familiar AI defense playbook. Training is transformative. Learning from images is how human artists learn. And, in a counterpunch, Midjourney accused Disney and Universal of “unclean hands,” claiming their own employees and vendors use Midjourney internally for ideation.

That last point is interesting, but legally fragile. Hypocrisy is not permission.

Why this matters to individual artists

On the surface, this looks like billion-dollar companies fighting over territory. Underneath it, artists should be paying attention.

If the courts decide that AI training requires permission or licensing, that principle does not belong exclusively to Disney. It applies to everyone who holds copyright.

Individual artists do not have the resources to litigate that fight. Disney and Universal do. They are effectively spending billions to establish rules that will govern the entire ecosystem.

A ruling in their favor could force AI companies to adopt licensing models rather than scraping. That opens the door, at least in theory, to opt-in datasets and new revenue streams for creators.

More importantly, this case directly challenges the idea that “style” is fair game. The lawsuit targets the ability to reproduce the look and feel of protected characters. If that argument holds, it could strengthen protections against tools that generate work “in the style of” living artists.

The timing is not accidental

As of January 2026, the case is still in discovery. No ruling yet. But the pressure has already reshaped activities across the industry.

Companies like Adobe and Getty Images have doubled down on “commercially safe” models trained only on licensed or public-domain content. That is not altruism. It is risk management.

Then there is the move that changes how this lawsuit should be read.

In December 2025, Disney announced a three-year, $1 billion deal with OpenAI. Disney became the first major studio to license its characters to OpenAI’s tools, including Sora and ChatGPT, under strict guardrails. No actor likenesses. No voice replication. Tight controls.

Disney did not sue OpenAI. That was a choice.

The stick and the carrot

Look at the sequence.

June 2025: Disney and Universal sue Midjourney. December 11, 2025: Disney announces a $1 billion deal with OpenAI. Same day: Disney sends a massive cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging copyright violations across Gemini and YouTube.

This reads less like a coincidence and more like a strategy. Litigation is the stick. Licensing as the carrot.

The message to AI companies is clear. You can fight us in court for a decade, or you can write a very large check and play inside our walls.

The walled garden problem

The OpenAI deal is not about stopping AI. It is about controlling it.

Disney didn’t just license content. They took an equity stake. They provided a clean, high-fidelity dataset that lets AI generate character-consistent output without legal risk. And they explicitly excluded actor likenesses to avoid union backlash and exposure to deepfakes.

From a corporate perspective, it is a smart move. From an artist's perspective, it raises an uncomfortable question. What happens after Disney and Universal “get their bag”?

The risk to independent creators

If Disney and Universal win, they will establish a precedent. Training requires permission. That sounds like a win for artists.

But precedent without access can cut both ways.

A pay-to-play licensing world favors those who already control massive catalogs. Smaller artists may find themselves excluded, not compensated. AI companies could simply stop training on unlicensed individual work altogether, consolidating cultural output around a handful of corporate datasets.

That creates a two-tier system.

An elite tier where major studios license and profit. An open tier where individual creators are left outside the walls.

This is the real tension of the AI copyright wars. Not whether AI exists, but who gets to decide what it is allowed to learn from.

Disney is not trying to kill generative AI. They are trying to own the map. And once the roads are built, everyone else has to decide whether they can travel on them.

Warner Bros. Discovery v. Midjourney (2:25-cv-08376): Filed in September 2025

copyright 2026 Howard Simpson