Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney, a generative AI company accusing it of copyright infringement according to a copy of the complaint obtained by Axios.
Why It Matters: It’s the first legal action that major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company.
Hollywood’s AI concerns so far have mostly been from actors and writers trying to defend their name, image and likeness from being leveraged by movie studio without a fair value trade. Now, those studios are trying to protect themselves against AI tech giants.
The complaint, filed in a U.S. District Court in central California, accuses Midjourney of both direct and secondary copyright infringement by using the studios’ intellectual property to train their large language model and by displaying AI-generated images of their copyrighted characters.
The filing shows dozens of visual examples that it claims show how Midjourney’s image generation tool produces replicas of their copyright-protected characters, such as ha NBCU’s Minions characters, and Disney characters from movies such as “The Lion King” and “Aladdin.”
ArsTechnica reported: On Wednesday, Disney and NBCUniversal filed a lawsuit against AI-image-synthesis company Midjourney, accusing the company of copyright infringement for allowing users to create images of characters like Darth Vader and Shrek, reports the Hollywood Reporter.
The complaint, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks the first major legal action by Hollywood studios against a generative AI company.
Midjourney is a subscription image-synthesis service and comment that allows its users to submit written descriptions called prompts to an AI model that generates new images based on then. It has been well known for years that AI image-synthesis models such as the ones that power Midjourney have been trained on copyrighted artworks without rights holder permission.
The lawsuit describes San Francisco-based Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that enables users to generate what the studios call “AI slop” – personalized images of copyrighted characters. Disney Enterprises, Marvel, LucasFilm, 20th Century, Universal City Studios Productions, and DreamWorks Animation joined forces the legal filing.
TechCrunch reported: Disney and Universal have sued generative AI platform Midjourney for allegedly training its art-generating ad -editing models on their content without permission.
Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming that Midjourney ignored their earlier requests to cease violating their intellectual property rights, according to The Wall Street Journal. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, includes dozens of examples of images generated by Midjourney that depict the studio’s copyrighted characters, like Homer Simpson and Darth Vader.