This is fine artist KC Green settles with Artisan
AI startup pulls ads using his burning-room dog, subway marketing turns copyright disputes into street-level evidence
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Image Credits:Justin Sullivan / Getty Images
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A photo of Kane Parsons and Chiwetel Ejiofor on the set of "Backrooms."
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An ad for AI company Artisan is posted on 2nd Street on December 05, 2024 in San Francisco, California.
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This is fine artist KC Green settles with Artisan, subway ads for an AI sales assistant trigger a fast legal retreat, marketing budgets meet copyright boundaries
KC Green, the cartoonist behind the “This is fine” meme, has reached a settlement with AI startup Artisan after the company used a version of his artwork in advertising, according to TechCrunch. The ads appeared on buses and subways and repurposed Green’s familiar dog-in-a-burning-room image to sell an AI assistant called Ava, swapping the original caption for “My pipeline is on fire” and adding the prompt: “Hire Ava the AI BDR.”
The dispute surfaced publicly earlier in May when Green posted that his art had been “stolen like AI steals,” and urged followers to vandalize the ads if they saw them, TechCrunch reports. That kind of call-to-action is unusual from an artist who normally makes a living by drawing, not by litigating, and Green told the publication he was frustrated at having to engage with the American court system instead of focusing on his comics.
Artisan, for its part, framed the incident as a misunderstanding while moving quickly once the backlash landed. The company said it had “a lot of respect for Green and his work,” and its founder and CEO, Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, said earlier this week that the sides had reached an agreement. Green confirmed to TechCrunch that they “reached a settlement pretty quick,” and that Artisan took down the ads in New York and San Francisco that used his character.
The episode is small in dollar terms—no settlement figure was reported—but it is revealing in how AI marketing is colliding with the copyright realities of the internet’s image library. Startups selling automation tools often lean on the language and iconography of online culture because it travels fast and reads as familiar. The same familiarity is also what makes infringement easy to spot: a cartoon dog surrounded by flames is not a generic stock illustration.
It also shows how disputes in the AI economy can be less about training data than about the downstream uses that are visible to commuters. Much of the argument over AI and art happens in the background, inside model training pipelines that are hard to audit. A subway ad is the opposite: a public artifact, bought with real money, tied to a brand, and photographed by anyone.
Green removed his initial social media post criticizing Artisan as part of the agreement, TechCrunch reports. Artisan removed the ads.
The meme’s original line is still intact. The startup’s version lasted only as long as its media buy.