Brad Colbow
Illustrator & Tech Reviewer
Cleveland illustrator and YouTube’s go-to drawing-tablet reviewer (900K+ subscribers), whose 2026 essay “My Thoughts On Generative AI” laid out a working artist’s case against AI trained on unlicensed art: “I own my art. If you want to make money off it, too, you need to pay me.”
In his words
If you’re building a for-profit company that requires copyrighted work in order to operate, you need to get permission from the license holder in order to use and profit from that work. I own my art. If you want to make money off it, too, you need to pay me.
The AI backlash is young. It is just beginning. And the desire for human-made content is only going to grow stronger and stronger and stronger from here.
Biography
Brad Colbow is a Cleveland-based designer and illustrator who spent years as a freelance web designer — drawing “The Brads,” a comic strip about web design published in .net magazine — before his YouTube channel made him the internet’s best-known reviewer of drawing tablets, iPads, and creative tech, with over 900,000 subscribers and courses at Brad’s Art School.
A thousand potatoes from a thousand fields
After years of scattered commentary in videos like “The Legal Battle Over AI Art,” “I Can Spot AI Art Instantly,” and “AI can Never Replace Ghibli,” Colbow consolidated his position in June 2026 with “My Thoughts On Generative AI.” His opposition rests on how the models are trained: he likens scraping to a restaurant inventing a machine that steals one potato from a thousand farmers’ fields — undetectable, unpunished, and still theft that eventually puts every farmer out of business. Walking through the four factors of fair use, he argues AI training fails the market-effect test because replacing the humans who made the training data “is the whole selling point of AI.”
AI is not a person. It’s a very complicated software program designed to make companies money. It can’t think and it can’t feel like a person. It can just mimic what people have done.
Colbow speaks from experience on both sides of the extraction: he stopped publishing written reviews on his own site after Google’s AI summaries strangled the search traffic that justified them, and he notes that Reddit, Getty, and The New York Times get paid for training data while independent illustrators “don’t get the same protection under the law” because they cannot afford lawyers. AI content, in his fake-cheese analogy, can keep improving forever and still not be the real thing. Yet the video ends as a pep talk: indie films and creator-funded projects are beating studio blockbusters, and “if you love creating things, please, please do not stop creating things.”
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/brad-colbow