Disney and NBCUniversal have filed a joint suit against AI company Midjourney alleging copyright infringement on their various properties. The complaint, filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, includes images created by Midjourney that feature a wide variety of protected characters from each company’s various properties, including Star Wars, Shrek, The Simpsons, Despicable Me and others. The 110-page suit alleges that the AI company “helped itself to countless” copyrighted works when training its models that have been creating and disseminating “innumerable” copies of these characters via AI-generated images.
In the lawsuit Midjourney is described as "the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.” Disney and NBCUniversal are the first major Hollywood players to enter the now crowded field of AI copyright infringement lawsuits; it comes against the backdrop of similar lawsuits against OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity AI.
The intersection of art and artificial intelligence continues to be battled out in court, though a suit brought by two of the largest names in media properties carries immense weight. “We are bullish on the promise of A.I. technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s general counsel, in an email to The New York Times. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an A.I. company does not make it any less infringing.”
In a separate email to The New York Times, Kim Harris, general counsel for NBCUniversal, said, “We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”
We've reached out to Midjourney for comment and will update if we hear back.
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