“Bottomless Pit of Plagiarism” Disney and Universal Team Up to Sue AI Company to Protect Their Content

Disney and Universal have teamed up to sue a major Artificial Intelligence company for copyright infringement. This is the first time that any of the major Hollywood studios have taken action against a generative AI company.

At Mickey Visit, we cover the latest Disney and theme park news. While we don’t cover all business stories, this one is important because AI is an existential threat to Disney and all creative companies and will impact all the content that you see. The topic is also one that hits close to home, as we and all other digital media publications are worried about how AI will impact what we do. All the details on this case are below.

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Disney and Universal Team Up to Fight AI Copyright Infringement

Disney and Universal have sued Midjourney, the generative AI company behind a tool that generates images from natural language, for recreating iconic characters through their tool without approval. Throughout this article are examples of the images generated by the tool. The images on the left are AI-generated.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the two companies said in the complaint filed in a U.S. District Court in California, according to Brooks Barnes at The New York Times.

Midjourney “helped itself to countless” Disney and Universal films and shows to allow the software to autogenerate images that “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters.”

Midjourney and other AI startups train their tools on other people’s content that they often do not pay for. The practice has raised major concerns across content creators of all sizes. At Mickey Visit, we know that these AI engines are ingesting our articles without paying for them to train their own language models. They then combine our articles with dozens of other sources to mass produce content at scale with no payment to the people who did the actual work to gather the information.

Many creators feel helpless about this consumption of data, so it is heartening to see the biggest players pushing back. There have already been a big round of lawsuits against different AI engines from different groups, ranging from media companies, including The New York Times, to music labels to authors.

Up until this point, no major Hollywood studio has taken any legal action against a generative AI company. The loudest alarms about AI in Hollywood have come from the actors and writers. These concerns were raised during the last strike period as they worked to put AI usage blocks in the union contracts with the studios. They are worried about their name, image, and likeness being leveraged by the studios without a fair value trade.

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Now, the studios themselves are ready to stand up to protect their intellectual property value against these rising tech giants.

According to Sara Fischer’s report at Axios, the complaint accused Midjourney of copyright infringement by “using the studios’ intellectual property to train their large language model and by displaying AI-generated images of their copyrighted characters”.

The filing showcases dozens of visual examples of how Midjourney’s image generation tool rips off copyrighted characters, including Disney characters from movies such as Frozen, Star Wars, and The Lion King, and Universal characters like the Minions and Shrek.

“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. But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing” Horacio Gutierrez, senior executive vice president, chief legal and compliance officer of The Walt Disney Company said in an statement to Axios.

He continued, “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”.

Here are more examples released with the lawsuit.

Look at the Lion King characters.

Then, here’s a look at Kung Fu Panda.

This might be the most visually striking example of them getting it close to the original character.

Another Pixar image, though this time much more off.

And, here’s a final image from Star Wars.

We are going to be watching this case closely because it represents such an important protection for creative companies to maintain. If AI engines are allowed to rip off Frozen with their own version of the movie, Disney’s version becomes far less valuable. The same is true for all creative works. Beyond that, if we allow AI to dominate all content creation with no guardrails, there will be no incentive for new inputs, and everything will be a sloppy derivative of something made by another person in the past.

The visual nature of this copyright infringement makes this a far more obvious case than that of copyright infringement by written works. We are still hopeful that the tides will turn on the protection of written works so that publishing and content creation can remain a viable business.

Top image is also from the court filing.

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