AI-generated images are a legal mess – and still a very human process

With AI, one can now produce thousands of high-quality illustrations and videos. But that is only part of the story.

Last August, a group of artists took AI imaging tools providers to court, which ruled against Stability AI and MidJourney’s motion to dismiss the artists’ copyright infringement claims. The case has moved to discovery and is set to begin in September 2026.

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“In reaching this decision, the judge found both direct and induced copyright infringement claims to be plausible,” explains Zach Schor in the NYU Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law. “The induced infringement claim against Stability AI argued that by distributing their model, Stable Diffusion, to other AI providers, the company facilitated the copying of copyrighted material.”

In allowing this claim to proceed, “the judge noted a statement by Stability’s CEO, who claimed that Stability compressed 100,000 gigabytes of images into a two-gigabyte file that could ‘recreate’ any of those images.”

The implications

The implications of such litigation — as well as the rising and often controversial use of generative AI for producing images for commercial use — are profound for designers, businesses, and society at large. In the big picture, however, it’s clear that generative AI — used fairly and ethically — may also take creative processes to new levels.

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“GenAI touches the core of the deeply human creative process, impacting the lives of all consumers and creators, whether amateurs or professionals,” according to Minos Bantourakis and Francesco Venturini, writing in a recent World Economic Forum report. “While genAI will surely expand the canvas of possibility, empowering more people, including those without deep technical or artistic skills, to join the creators’ board, ensuring the advent of this technology benefits humanity is of paramount importance.”

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But organizations have to be ready for this change in their creative and design processes. Generative AI means corporate materials, marketing pitches, branding assets, and all other content can be rapidly generated and proliferated — but this is only part of the story.

The potential

Importantly, there must be an understanding of the potential of this powerful technology. While many creators, designers, and artists are leery of AI and its impact on their work and careers, others see new possibilities. 

Norman Teague, a designer and educator whose practice spans furniture design, public art, and community-driven projects, has chosen to embrace AI to deliver his message. His exhibition, assisted by generative AI via Adobe’s Firefly tool, features artists and designers traditionally excluded from museums. The exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Designer’s Choice: Norman Teague – Jam Sessions, parallels that of a “musical jam session,” which emphasizes collaboration, respect, and improvisation,” according to the MoMA description.

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Teague’s approach was, while embracing AI, “he’s still the artist. I’m still a trained designer; he’s going to use it as part of his ideation process,” said Hannah Elsakr, vice president of business and new venture incubation at Adobe. “This is now enabling him to put hundreds of ideas down and filter through them quickly. People who understand how it can augment what they do are embracing it completely.”

Adobe states that all illustrations generated through its Firefly model are permissioned, and artists are compensated.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Elsakr, who spearheaded Adobe’s launch of its enterprise version of Firefly. She sees AI tools as providing designers and creators an option to amplify and accelerate their work within ever-busy organizations and agencies. “It provides more time to do what they’re humanly gifted at doing, which is finding quality creative ideas,” she said. “AI is not the bad thing creating; there’s also bad creative without AI. AI is providing a higher-bar creative.”

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For example, AI promises to take away some of the time-consuming rote work involved in video preparation — the resizing, the reframing of video, she noted. This frees up designers and content creators to concentrate on new ideas, said Elsakr. “Human ingenuity actually becomes more important and is the differentiator. Norman Teague shows now there’s a whole re-imagination of artistic works. AI is an elegant new paintbrush in his toolkit.”

AI brings a capability to extend to organizations under pressure to scale high-quality content creation to different constituencies or markets across the globe. Creators and designers can explore many options and features that can be custom-made for diverse audiences.

The gotcha

Of course, creating and delivering content to audiences in different markets is only one piece of the process. Such works need to be subject to human oversight and review — think C-level executives and legal departments. As anyone who has worked with executive committees knows, this can slow projects to a crawl. “Review, inspection, and approval are really important,” said Elsakr. “In agentic or creative flows, we still have humans at the center, a human in the loop.”

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An organization needs to be ready for the changes gen AI can bring to creative processes, she said. That’s why skills, change management, and executive sponsorship are the most essential elements of these processes. “This is not just about technology change, this is going to take transformative process change. It may change the skills that you need. There will be upskilling. What I say to customers: Look at your current workflow. How do you do it now? Is it 3,000 steps with manual hand-offs?”

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Change management is “the gotcha,” she points out. “The technology’s there, but the change management is not always there.” In addition, executive sponsorship means there is “somebody who can raise their hand and say, I’m the one who’s behind this project, I’m going to work with people to get it done and drive the change. Because humans dislike change overall. So when you’re trying to get people into that new thing, we found that even internally for our own processes.”

The bottom line is that while technology provides the tools to create and mass-produce content, it’s still a very human process.

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