Artist sues AI meme generator for selling deeply personal comic as ad template

Elmer Saflor never asked to be an Internet legend. Back in 2017 his two-panel comic — a man chasing a balloon marked "opportunities" while a smiling pink blob labeled "shyness" holds him back — took off and became one of those templates everyone remixes, from jokes about broke wallets to procrastinating on side projects. Saflor was fine with that. What he's not fine with is a company called Memes Apps, LLC, which runs Memes.ai and Memes AI Studio, allegedly offering his comic as a paid template inside an AI ad generator, letting subscribers churn out commercial ads without ever asking him.

Saflor filed suit this month, and by his own admission to Ars Technica, he hasn't actually seen his comic show up in a finished ad yet, nor did he reach out to the company first. The lawsuit, he says, is partly a tool to force discovery — to find out how widely his template has actually been used inside a platform whose portfolio, per the complaint, includes work with more than 40 brands producing up to 1,000 ads a month for over 75 million social followers. That's a lot of scale to be moving through a system built on templates like his, if the numbers hold up.

Internet law expert Eric Goldman told Ars that Saflor is telling "the right story" and pointed to a 2024 ruling over the "SuccessKid" meme, where a court found that using a meme in an ad crossed a line that casual sharing doesn't. But Goldman also flagged the risk in Saflor's strategy: going after the meme generator itself, rather than the advertisers who might actually run the ads, could force a judge to grapple with the entire meme ecosystem's plumbing, not just one comic. A win for Saflor that's too broad could threaten how meme culture functions generally, which might make courts more cautious rather than less. What may hurt Memes Apps, in Goldman's view, is the specific packaging — subscription tiers reportedly priced at $40 and $199 a month that bundle access to meme templates for ad-making — unless the company can show that's simply how the industry works.

Proving damages could be its own fight. If it turns out no advertiser actually used Saflor's balloon-and-blob comic, his claim of "substantial economic damage" gets harder to back up, and Goldman noted that even in a win, calculating a payout from a subscription-based platform is messy since there's no clean way to value what one meme template contributed to the whole service.

Goldman sees a bigger echo here too. In the larger AI copyright wars, companies often defend themselves by arguing their models don't spit out exact copies of protected work — but when they do, as Saflor alleges happens here, the stakes go up sharply for defendants. Even so, Goldman doubts this case moves the needle much beyond meme culture, since memes by nature spread through mass, unauthorized copying in a way that sits awkwardly with copyright law to begin with. Saflor, for his part, isn't anti-AI — he says he uses AI tools himself — but he wants Memes Apps treated as a cautionary example of what happens when a platform markets itself around replacing human creative work entirely, memes included.