Bonnier uses Midjourney for Unni Lindell book cover

Bonnier Forlag has discovered a novel cultural technology: replace an illustrator with Midjourney, then act surprised when illustrators notice. According to Norway’s NRK, the publisher used Midjourney to generate the cover for Unni Lindell’s children’s book “Frøken Snushane og himmelhuset” after the illustrator of the first book, Odin Helgheim, “did not have capacity” for the sequel. Helgheim told NRK he had nothing to do with the new cover and that he is “principally opposed” to printing AI illustrations.

The public dispute has mostly been framed as “solidarity” — a moral appeal that avoids the legal questions. Cartoonist Flu Hartberg, who leads the advocacy group Kiki (Kunstnerisk initiativ for regulering av kunstig intelligens), called the move “horribly unsolidaristic” and part of what he and others describe as “AI theft,” NRK reports. Author Guri Idsø Viken similarly objected that the AI cover appears to mimic the style and expression of the earlier human-designed cover.

But solidarity isn’t the core issue; property rights and liability are. If a publisher commissions a human cover, the rights chain is legible: contract, copyright, moral rights, and clear responsibility for infringement. With a generative model, the rights chain becomes a fog machine.

Three questions matter.

First: who owns the training data, and on what terms was it licensed? Midjourney does not disclose its full training corpus in a way that would let a publisher certify provenance, which means the publisher is outsourcing legal risk to a black box while still putting its own logo on the product.

Second: what counts as “style cloning,” and who bears liability when a cover is “almost identical” to a prior design? Copyright law typically protects expression, not style — but near-derivative composition, characters, or distinctive elements can still trigger claims. A publisher using AI as a production shortcut may end up litigating the difference between “inspired by” and “copied,” with model outputs as the only witness.

Third: what is the compliance path? Watermarking and provenance tooling (for example, C2PA-style metadata) can help, but only if publishers demand it and courts care. Otherwise, the industry’s likely equilibrium is predictable: large publishers build internal AI pipelines with curated, licensed corpora; smaller creators get squeezed; and regulators arrive late to bless the incumbents’ paperwork.

Grafill, the Norwegian association for designers and illustrators, told NRK that many members already report fewer assignments, citing a survey where 48% of 800 respondents saw declining work. That is the real story: automation of an intermediary layer. Publishers are discovering they can fire illustrators — while simultaneously arguing they must be protected from Big Tech. Bonnier is doing what organizations do when a new tool lowers marginal costs: it tests how much of the creative supply chain can be commoditized before the lawsuits arrive.