This is a Throwback Thursday and a little bit of Fahrenheit AI AI generative art.

In April 2025, Apparelist published my article, AI Generative Art in 2025: Integration, Ethics, and Originality. This year, The Academy membership selected it as the overall 2026 Dave Swormstedt Sr. Memorial Award winner. It also won Best-in-Class for Apparel Textile Screen Printing. In addition, the Fahrenheit AI series won Best-in-Class for Business, Technology and Historical. Generative AI moves fast, so a year and a half is a long time. Here’s the rundown: what I wrote, and what changed.

The Tools: One Subscription, Many Models

In 2025, I ran Midjourney, Ideogram and Recraft side by side. I wrote that it’s best to have all the options “if you can afford the subscriptions.” Each tool meant another monthly bill. I have tracked this lineup since 30 Days Rubbernecking AI Generators.

Since, Adobe turned Firefly into a hub for other companies’ models. Today, Firefly offers partner models from Google, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, Ideogram, Runway and others. As a result, one Creative Cloud plan reaches most of the field. However, the terms differ by model. Adobe’s enterprise indemnification covers only certain Google and OpenAI partner models.

The models leapt, too. In 2025, I wrote that ChatGPT “collaborates.” That was the first GPT Image release. Since then, OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Images 2.0 in April 2026 and Images 2.5 in September. Google entered with Nano Banana Pro. Midjourney reached V8.2, its default model since July 24, 2026. Text was my biggest complaint in 2025. Now the top models render text far better. I first tested that gap in “Hey MidJourney, Hold My Beer”.

Build Your Own Art Engine, Revisited

My 2025 setup ran Automatic1111, InvokeAI and LoRAs on an Apple M4 Max. I trained a model on my own contour drawings of Adirondack chairs. It couldn’t spell. Still, it was mine. Reviewers now say Forge and ComfyUI have passed Automatic1111 for serious work. Meanwhile, Adobe announced Firefly Custom Models at MAX 2025. They generate in a creator’s own style. In other words, the personal model went mainstream. The tradeoff stays the same, though. A cloud model lives on someone else’s server. A local model lives on yours. I made that case in °FAI: Bicycles, Not Rockets.

Who Gets Paid?

In 2025, I reported that the Firefly Contributor Bonus averaged around $10. I also noted the 2024 TRAIN Act, which targeted unauthorized data scraping.

Since then, four senators reintroduced the TRAIN Act in July 2025. The sponsors cross party lines: Welch, Blackburn, Schiff and Hawley. Then a House version followed in January 2026. The bill lets creators subpoena training records to learn if a model used their work.

Meanwhile, the courts moved faster than Congress. In Bartz v. Anthropic, authors won a $1.5 billion settlement over pirated books used in AI training. A judge granted final approval on July 20, 2026. That works out to roughly $3,100 per book.

Images are still in court. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in June 2025. Warner Bros. Discovery filed its own suit that September. As of July 2026, the fight was still in discovery. No court had ruled on fair use. I wrote about who holds that power in °FAI: AI Companies More Powerful Than Governments.

Enforceable Metadata Arrived, Partly

In 2025, I wrote that content credentials vanish once a file runs through normal production. I also wrote this: “Fair use, licensing, clear opt-outs, and enforceable metadata should not be optional.”

In California, it is no longer optional for the biggest players. The California AI Transparency Act took effect August 2, 2026. Generative AI providers with over one million monthly users must embed hidden provenance data in images. They must also offer a free detection tool. Starting in 2027, large platforms cannot knowingly strip that data.

However, the law binds providers and platforms. It does not bind our prepress. The gap I described in 2025 still lives inside our own shops.

The poison tools had a rough year. Researchers presented LightShed at USENIX Security 2025. It detected Nightshade-protected images 99.98% of the time, then removed the protection. The Glaze team still disputes that Glaze is broken.

What Held Up

I closed the 2025 piece with an opinion: “Art is human.” In March 2026, the Supreme Court declined to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter. That left the rule in place. Copyright requires a human author.

The court did not say how much human input is enough. Still, the direction is clear. The human part of the work is the part you can own. That is why I keep a human in the loop in every system I build.