Hollywood Battles AI Industry Over Plagiarism

It was only a matter of time before Hollywood took the fight to the artificial intelligence (AI) industry over its alleged abuse of intellectual property.

Disney and Universal are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order barring Midjourney from further infringing activities. I Photo: Coolcaesar Wikimedia Commons

Now, it’s on, Ryan Faughnder wrote in The Wide Shot column for the Los Angeles Times.

Last week, Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures filed a lawsuit against AI firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing the popular image generator of blatantly copying and profiting from copyrighted images of characters from iconic franchises such as Star Wars, Minions, Cars, Marvel, The Simpsons, and Shrek.

The complaint includes numerous examples and dozens of striking side-by-side images showing how Midjourney’s San Francisco-based technology allegedly produced nearly identical depictions of characters like Darth Vader, Iron Man, Bart Simpson, Woody, and Elsa—sometimes even replicating frames that resemble scenes from the original films and shows.

The studios claim that Midjourney used these images to promote its subscription service and drive traffic to its image-generation platform.

Disney and Universal are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order barring Midjourney from further infringing activities, including the use of studio-owned content to train a forthcoming AI video-generation tool.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the studios' attorneys wrote in the 110-page complaint. “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 stakes, according to the studios, are high. They argue that the AI company’s use of copyrighted material “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”