It took long enough, but major Hollywood studios are jumping into the fight against AI. Disney and Universal have filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, the AI image generation tool. They called it a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that generates “endless unauthorized copies.” There’s already a class action lawsuit against Midjourney by various artists that was launched in 2023.

The complaint features images that show how Midjourney uses the studios’ intellectual property. One image of Yoda from Star Wars holding a lightsaber is an example and it was generated by using the prompt “Yoda with lightsaber.”

AI is arguing that their use of other’s creations and copyrighted works is fair use. Some execs have admitted publicly if they had to pay for the use, there’d be no business model as it’d be too cost prohibitive. The question really before the courts is if what AI is doing is transformative enough to fall under fair use. The end answer may be what’s generated is but what is used to get there isn’t. Some lawyers have stated that Disney’s examples make it a very hard case for Midjourney to win. The Disney and Universal complaint specifically highlights how Midjourney hurts and threatens their business.

In an interview with Rob Salkowitz at Forbes, Midjourney Founder/CEO David Holz stated:

It’s just a big scrape of the internet. We use the open data sets that are published and train across those. There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that’s not a thing; there’s not a registry.

The quote has been taken as a tacit admission Midjourney was trained on copyrighted material.

Disney and Universal are asking Midjourney to “adopt technological measures” to prevent image generation using infringing materials. They also claim Midjourney ignored theur demands, cleaned copies of Universal and Disney’s work during the training process which created more copies of the material.

Up to this point, it’s mainly been the creators themselves leading the fights against AI theft with numerous lawsuits launched against multiple AI companies. Other businesses have cut deals to allow their content to be used to train AI models.