The Walt Disney Co. and NBC Universal Media LLC today announced they have joined forces in a lawsuit against artificial intelligence image creator Midjourney Inc., the lawsuit calling the company a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”
The complaint, filed in a U.S. District Court in central California, follows a slew of lawsuits in which creators of content, be it journalism, art, music or fiction writing, have hit back against AI firms for using their work to train their models without due compensation. The case today is the first in which Hollywood studios have taken legal action, with the lawsuit calling Midjourney a “virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted work.”
The studios claim the image-generating firm has no legal right to reproduce the characters they have created, including Darth Vader from Star Wars, the Minions from Despicable Me, Shrek, Buzz Lightyear, Deadpool, Iron Man, Aladdin, Spider-Man, Yoda, WALL-E and the list goes on.
“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” said the companies. “Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing.”
The studios claim that Midjourney has ignored multiple requests in the past to stop infringing on their copyrighted content or to take technological measures, as some other image-generation companies have done, to rebuff users’ prompts to recreate copyrighted work.
″Midjourney, which has attracted millions of subscribers and made $300 million last year alone, is focused on its own bottom line and ignored Plaintiffs,” said the lawsuit, which also talked about Midjourney’s video-generator that is yet to be released. The lawsuit claims it “will generate, publicly display, and distribute videos featuring Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted characters.”
Midjourney hasn’t yet responded to media about the lawsuit, although Chief Executive David Holz has waxed philosophical in the past about the crux of AI copyright lawsuits.
“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” he told the Associated Press in 2022. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people, and if it wasn’t, then it would destroy the whole professional art industry, probably the nonprofessional industry too. To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.”
Photo: Unsplash
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