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  • The Lawsuits That Will Decide What AI Art Companies Owe Artists

    Three years of arguing about AI art online are about to run into an actual courtroom. One case just closed. One goes to trial next month. One was filed this year and hasn’t gotten there yet. Here’s what each one actually decided, or is about to.

    The Case That’s Already Over: Thaler v. Perlmutter

    Computer scientist Stephen Thaler built a generative AI system he calls the Creativity Machine. It produced an image titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise.” Thaler tried to register the copyright and listed the Creativity Machine itself as the author, with himself as owner. He hadn’t prompted the system for that specific image and made no edits to what it produced.

    The Copyright Office refused. The D.C. Circuit agreed with the Copyright Office. On March 2, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to even hear the case, which leaves the lower court’s ruling standing as the law: a copyrightable work has to have a human author. Fully AI-generated work, with no meaningful human involvement, doesn’t qualify. Full stop, at least until Congress decides to write a different rule.

    This doesn’t touch the harder question. It says a machine can’t hold a copyright. It says nothing about whether the machine was allowed to train on your work in the first place.

    The One Going to Trial: Andersen v. Stability AI

    Illustrators Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed this one back in January 2023, against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt together. The claim: these companies trained their models on millions of copyrighted images, scraped without consent, without payment, and without so much as a heads-up.

    The case has been trimmed down since. The DMCA claims got dismissed. Judge Orrick dismissed the claims against Midjourney and DeviantArt too, though the plaintiffs got leave to amend and refile. What’s still standing, and heading to an actual jury, is Andersen’s claim that Stability AI’s use of her work to train Stable Diffusion was copyright infringement. Trial starts September 8, 2026.

    One detail from discovery is worth sitting with. Leaked internal documents reportedly showed Midjourney employees keeping a curated list of over 16,000 artists whose specific styles they wanted the model to be able to imitate. Not a broad dataset that happened to include artists. A list, with names on it, built on purpose.

    The New One: Midjourney, Again

    Early 2026 brought a fresh class action aimed specifically at Midjourney, alleging its training dataset was built by scraping more than 100 million images from ArtStation, DeviantArt, and personal portfolio sites. If you’re a working fantasy illustrator, those aren’t three random platforms. That’s probably where your own portfolio lives right now.

    Separately, and with a strange bit of symmetry, Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. are suing Midjourney too, in a case that’s currently in discovery. Midjourney’s defense strategy reportedly includes trying to force the studios to disclose their own internal AI use. Everybody scraping everybody, arguing about who scraped worse.

    What This Actually Means Right Now

    Nothing is settled yet. Thaler answered one question (a machine can’t own a copyright) and left the bigger one open (can a machine train on your work without asking). That answer comes out of a California courtroom starting next month, and even then, only for Stability AI specifically, not the whole industry at once.

    What doesn’t wait for a verdict: your own work, commissioned directly, drawn by a person you can actually talk to, was never part of any of these lawsuits to begin with. That’s not a legal argument. It’s just true.

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  • What AI Art Actually Cost Fantasy Illustrators, and Where They Went Instead

    Wizards of the Coast has a stated policy against AI art. Wizards of the Coast has also been caught using AI art four separate times in eighteen months. Both of those things are true at once, and the gap between them tells you more about the fantasy art industry right now than either fact does alone.

    Four Times in Eighteen Months

    August 2023: fans noticed artwork in the sourcebook Glory of the Giants looked AI-generated. The artist confirmed it in tweets that got deleted shortly after. Wizards updated its artist guidelines to explicitly ban AI in the creation process.

    December 2023: fans accused art in the 2024 Player’s Handbook of being AI-generated. This time they were wrong. Artist Nestor Ossandon provided work-in-progress sketches to prove the piece was hand-drawn, and Wizards backed him publicly.

    January 2024: AI art turned up in a Magic: The Gathering marketing image. Wizards denied it. Two days later, Wizards admitted they were wrong and blamed an unnamed vendor.

    May 2024: Wizards updated its contributor policy to formally ban AI in finished products. The same month, Hasbro posted a job listing for a principal AI engineer.

    None of these are the same incident retold four times. They’re four different failures, each one prompting a real, specific denial or apology, none of them changing what happened the next time. A policy that gets restated after every violation isn’t really a policy. It’s a press release with a short memory.

    Those four are the ones with an actual paper trail: an admission, a correction, a denial that got reversed within days. Plenty of other Wizards art has been floated by fans as possibly AI-generated over the same stretch, including some alternate covers. None of those have ever been confirmed one way or the other. I’m not going to list them as fact. A claim without a paper trail stays a claim, no matter how many people are repeating it.

    The CEO Says Two Different Things

    Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks makes the same split, one level up. In late 2024, he called AI integration into D&D “inevitable” and said that of the 30 to 40 people he personally games with, every single one of them uses AI somehow, for campaigns, characters, or story ideas. By 2026, on the creative side specifically, he’d reversed course. “We don’t even have it in our pipelines for our video games or for Magic: The Gathering or D&D,” he said. On a podcast around the same time, he called generative AI in creative work “garbage in, garbage out,” and added that it’s humans who inspire the good ideas and follow through on them.

    On the operational side, in that same stretch, he’s calling Hasbro’s AI integration a clear success. The company has real partnerships with Google Gemini, OpenAI, and ElevenLabs to embed AI into its own operations, and runs something called Hasbro AI Studio, led by Chief Creative Officer Gray Bright, not Cocks himself. The target: a million saved work-hours over twelve months, a billion dollars in cost savings by 2027. The line was never really “no AI.” The line is “no AI where you can see it.”

    What It Actually Costs

    The Society of Authors surveyed its members in January 2024: 12,500 members, 787 responses. 26% of illustrators said they’d already lost work to AI. A separate survey by the Association of Illustrators, nearly 7,000 respondents, found about one in three illustrators had lost work to it, at an average cost of close to $12,500 a year in wages.

    Those are averages. Here’s what it looks like for one person. Santiago Bautista González sold cartoon-style illustrations full-time on Fiverr. His income dropped by a third in January 2023, right as generative AI tools started flooding the same platform. Illustrator Shanée Benjamin, working in Brooklyn, called 2024 her hardest year yet. Her words: “Jobs are scarce.”

    The work that disappears first is rarely the specialized stuff. It’s the entry-level commissions: background pieces, placeholder art, quick concept sketches. That’s not a minor detail. That’s the work new illustrators use to build a client base and a portfolio before anyone will pay them for the harder jobs. Cut that rung out and the ladder doesn’t reach the ground anymore.

    Where Artists Actually Went

    Not everyone waited around for platforms to fix this. Cara launched as an artist portfolio and social platform built specifically to exclude AI-generated work, every post automatically tagged NoAI to discourage scraping. When Meta announced it would train its AI on Instagram and Facebook photos, Cara’s userbase went from 40,000 to over a million in a few weeks.

    A million people didn’t move because Cara had better filters or a nicer interface. They moved because somewhere finally said, plainly, that human work would stay human work. That’s a low bar. It’s also apparently a rare one.

    I don’t have a tidy prediction for how this settles. What I can tell you is what hasn’t changed through any of it: a hand-drawn character still takes the time it takes, and the people willing to pay for that are the reason any of us are still doing this for a living.

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  • Three Years After the OGL Fight: What Wizards of the Coast Did Next

    Three Years After the OGL Fight: What Wizards of the Coast Did Next

    Original illustration recreating the classic Keep on the Borderlands cover, adventurers ambushed by orcs below a keep

    I wrote the first version of this piece in May 2024, right after Wizards of the Coast walked back the OGL 1.1 changes. The original reporting below is mostly untouched, because it held up. Here’s what’s happened since. Three years on, the short version is: it got worse before anyone tried to make it better.

    The OGL Fight, in Brief

    The Open Gaming License has let independent publishers build D&D-compatible content since 2000, without going through Wizards of the Coast first. In late 2022 and early 2023, WotC tried to rewrite it. The new terms proposed royalties above a revenue threshold and approval rights over third-party content. Worse, the language raised real fears about invalidating agreements creators had already built businesses on.

    The backlash was immediate and it was loud. Over 15,000 survey responses came in, something like 90% opposed to any change. People cancelled subscriptions. Creators threatened boycotts. Weeks of sustained public pressure followed. WotC caved. OGL 1.0 stayed in place, the SRD 5.1 went under Creative Commons, and the company promised more transparency going forward.

    Third-party creators had already proven what they were worth before any of that happened. Kobold Press built Midgard into one of the richest settings outside official D&D. Goodman Games kept old-school adventure design alive through Dungeon Crawl Classics. MCDM Productions wrote the stronghold-and-followers rules WotC never got around to. The license made that possible. Wizards didn’t have to ask for it.

    The fight also pushed some of the biggest names in the space toward building their own systems, so they wouldn’t be dependent on WotC’s terms again. MCDM’s own game. DC20. Critical Role’s Daggerheart. All three exist partly because that trust broke once already.

    Sigil: A Very Expensive, Very Fast Collapse

    Project Sigil was unveiled at GenCon 2024 as WotC’s answer to the virtual tabletop boom: a fully 3D VTT, pitched hard at Baldur’s Gate 3 players. That was a strange bet from the start. What made BG3 work wasn’t that it rendered in 3D. It was Larian’s writing and systems design. WotC seemed to learn the wrong lesson from someone else’s success.

    Alpha landed in September 2024. Full release came in February 2025, with a limited feature set and a rough reception. Bugs. Usability complaints. A tool that didn’t do enough yet to earn the ambition behind it.

    Three weeks later, WotC laid off roughly 90% of the Sigil team. Senior writer Andy Collins. VFX artist Eben Bradstreet. Community manager Chung Ng. Gone, along with most of the people who’d built it. Dixon Dubow, the D&D Creator Relations Manager (the person third-party creators actually talked to) was let go in the same round. That detail matters for what comes next in this piece.

    Sigil limped along afterward, officially alive but effectively frozen. Wizards has now confirmed development is over for good. The servers shut down October 31, 2026. Anyone who bought a Master Tier subscription in the last six months gets a six-month credit. That’s the whole payout for an idea that got a GenCon keynote sixteen months earlier.

    What Replaced the People Who Got Let Go

    Here’s the part I’ll just lay out in order. The timeline does the work on its own.

    March 2025: WotC lays off most of an internal creative team, including the person who managed third-party creator relationships. Later that year, Wizards announces an expanded slate of official third-party publishing partners for the D&D Beyond Marketplace (Kobold Press, Free League, MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Hit Point Press, and others), plus new official Forgotten Realms adventures written by Kobold Press. The stated reason, in the coverage at the time, was simple: the internal team couldn’t keep up with demand.

    Wizards never said the quiet part out loud. Nobody in that position ever does. But an internal team got cut, and the resulting gap got filled by licensing the work out instead of hiring back in. Make of that what you will. I already have.

    The Union

    The most concrete answer to how the fallout actually landed happened this year. Magic: The Gathering Arena staff at Wizards of the Coast filed for a union election with the NLRB in April 2026. They voted June 2nd. It wasn’t close: 79 to 16, about 83% in favor. United Wizards of the Coast (UWOTC-CWA) announced the result on June 23rd. WotC accepted it.

    The organizing drive cited pay, return-to-office mandates, mandatory crunch, and layoffs. It also cited fear of AI displacing creative and development work. That fear is the same one every artist I know has been sitting with for two years now, just voiced this time by people on the inside instead of freelancers on the outside.

    What This Actually Means for Fantasy Art

    I make my living drawing the characters people play at these tables, so here’s the part that’s mine to say. None of this is unique to Wizards. Cut the internal team. Route the work outward. Let “third-party partnership” do the PR work that “layoff” can’t. That’s the pattern at every publisher with a big enough back catalog to license instead of a big enough budget to keep paying the people who built it.

    For working artists, that shows up two ways. The direct way: fewer staff positions, more piecework, harder competition for licensing slots that used to be full-time jobs. The quieter way, and the worse one: growing pressure to accept AI-generated art as good enough, because it’s free and a layoff isn’t.

    A union vote at a Magic the Gathering studio and a freelancer drawing someone’s tiefling bard look far apart. They’re not. Kobold Press didn’t need a licensing deal to make Midgard good. MCDM didn’t need WotC’s blessing to write rules worth using. Neither of them needed permission. They needed the work to be worth doing, and they did it anyway.

    For Anyone Who Actually Made It This Far

    Not many people read a three-year retrospective on licensing drama and a dead virtual tabletop all the way to the end. If you did, you’re exactly who I wrote this article for.

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