"Bottomless Pit of Plagiarism” - Disney Slams AI Tech in Scathing New Lawsuit

The Walt Disney Company has filed a major new lawsuit.

Exterior of The Walt Disney Company office building. — Credit: Disney

Disney has teamed up with NBCUniversal as part of a new lawsuit against Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence technology company, accusing it of copyright infringement.

The new lawsuit, filed in California, accuses Midjourney of direct and secondary copyright infringement, claiming the company used Disney and Universal’s intellectual property to train its AI model. Midjourney is capable of creating near-replicas of copyrighted characters, both from Universal and from Disney’s long catalog of films, TV productions, and other entertainment ventures.

AI has been advertised as a key that unlocks creative potential among the masses, giving the average consumer the power to create content up to par with major studios. AI appears most powerful when used ot create still images. Today, it’s incredibly easy to pump out lifelike images of famous fictional characters, with Aladdin, The Lion King, and Minions being some of the IP used, for example, in the suit.

A split image showing three versions of Homer Simpson: one realistic, AI-generated Disney-style portrait on the left, and two animated scenes from "The Simpsons" on the right, with Homer in different poses and backgrounds. — Midjourney”s AI-generated image of Homer Simpson (Left), screenshots of ‘The Simpsons’ used in the lawsuit (Right). Credit: Fox

Companies like Midjourney, founded in 2021, train their models by scraping data from the Internet. It’s a constantly evolving and self-feeding cycle. While the technology had major flaws initially, companies like Midjourney have tweaked and improved the product.

OpenAI has denied claims of copyright infringement, saying its actions fall under “fair use.”

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” said Disney and NBCU in the suit.

Both Disney and Universal claim they attempted to discuss alternatives with Midjourney prior to taking legal action. However, according to reports, Midjourney did not take the issue seriously. Midjourney “continued to release new versions of its Image Service, which, according to Midjourney’s founder and CEO, have even higher quality infringing images,” the complaint reads.

So far, most of the concerns regarding AI have been on the side of actors, creatives, and other industry members. As Axios reports, this is the first legal action major Hollywood studios have taken against a generative AI company like Midjourney.

“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,” Horacio Gutierrez, Disney’s general counsel, said in an email. “But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an A.I. company does not make it any less infringing.”

Kim Harris, Executive Vice President and General Counsel of NBCU, 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. Theft is theft regardless of the technology used, and this action involves blatant infringement of our copyrights.”

Stay tuned here for all updates on Disney and Universal.