The whole internet knows the picture: a dog sitting in a burning room and calmly saying "this is fine." The "This is fine" meme by illustrator K.C. Green became a symbol of pretending everything is normal while it all burns around you. This time, though, what was burning was copyright itself - because the AI startup Artisan used that very dog in its ads, without asking anyone.

The ads appeared on buses and the metro in New York and San Francisco. In them, the famous dog sits amid the flames, with text beside it reading: "My pipeline is on fire" and "Hire Ava, the AI agent." The message is clear - instead of a human, use our artificial intelligence. The irony of an AI company stealing someone's art to sell AI was clearly lost on the company itself.

Green didn't stay quiet. He publicly said his art was "stolen the way AI steals" and called on his followers to "vandalise" the ads. He also complained about something every independent creator knows: instead of working on what he loves, he has to spend time and energy on legal battles against someone with far more money.

In the end, the settlement came fast. Artisan agreed to pull the ads featuring Green's character from both cities, and Green took down his critical post. "We reached a settlement fairly quickly," the artist confirmed. The company, whose founder and CEO is Jaspar Carmichael-Jack, had earlier claimed it has "great respect for Green and his work" - respect it apparently discovered only after the character was already hanging on the buses.

The case is small, but it says something bigger. While the AI industry talks about creativity and the future, in practice it often just takes someone else's finished work and packages it as its own. The question that remains isn't whether Green will get his ads taken down - that already happened - but how many creators have neither the time nor the money to fight, and how many "This is fine" ads slip by unnoticed.