Hollywood studios target AI image generator in copyright lawsuit
1 min read
Summary
Disney and NBCUniversal has filed a lawsuit against AI image-synthesis company Midjourney, accusing the firm of copyright infringement.
The lawsuit, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, is the first such legal action by Hollywood studios against a generative AI company.
Midjourney allows users to create images of characters, such as Disney’s Darth Vader, by submitting written descriptions to an AI model.
The complaint claims Midjourney is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that enables the creation of AI “slop” – personalised images of copyrighted characters.
Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez stated that “piracy is piracy” and “the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing”.
The studios claim Midjourney used bots and scrapers to download copyrighted content from the internet to train its AI model.
