Disney and NBCUniversal are the first Hollywood players to take a legal swing at a generative AI company that they claim has stolen their copyrighted characters.
The US entertainment companies have launched a legal challenge against Midjourney, the AI image generator, accusing it of unlawfully using their intellectual property to train its image-generating software and create unauthorised reproductions of their most famous characters.
In a joint copyright infringement lawsuit filed in federal court in California on Tuesday, the studios alleged that Midjourney’s own website “displays hundreds, if not thousands, of images generated by its image service at the request of its subscribers that infringe plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”
Horacio Gutierrez, senior executive vice-president, chief legal and compliance officer of The Walt Disney Company, said: “Our world-class IP is built on decades of financial investment, creativity and innovation — investments only made possible by the incentives embodied in copyright law that give creators the exclusive right to profit from their works.
“We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,” he added. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”
Kim Harris, NBCUniversal’s vice-president and general counsel, said the studios had filed the lawsuit “to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content. Theft is theft regardless of the technology used, and this action involves blatant infringement of our copyrights.”
Midjourney, which was launched in 2021 and is run by founder David Holz, is said to have generated $100 million in revenue last year. The company has not yet commented on the lawsuit.
AI companies need huge amounts of text, images and video to fuel software such as ChatGPT and the image generator Midjourney.
The programs were created by taking copyrighted works from the internet without permission. Since the boom in AI, artists have sought to opt their works out of the practice.
In the UK, campaigners in the creative industries have sharply criticised government proposals which would allow AI developers to scrape copyrighted material for training purposes unless creators take action to exclude their works.
Book publishers called the approach “untested and unevidenced” while Sir Elton John described the government as “absolute losers” and said he feels “incredibly betrayed” over plans to exempt technology firms from copyright laws. Sir Paul McCartney has warned it could “wipe out” the creative industry.
