A rapidly expanding AI start-up was sued for copyright infringement by two Hollywood giants on Wednesday, intensifying the conflict over the future of AI-generated material.
Disney and Universal, the owners of the Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, and Despicable Me entertainment corporations, sued Midjourney on the grounds that it had improperly used their intellectual property to train its AI models that create images.
In the continuous struggle by artists, publishers, and content creators to prevent AI companies from utilizing their work as training data, or at the very least to make them pay for it, these major Hollywood studios are the first to bring copyright infringement charges.
Tech companies have been racing to create and market technologies that produce Hollywood-caliber photos and videos as AI advances at a rapid pace. In the upcoming years, these tools are expected to revolutionize filmmaking and the entertainment sector, according to experts, and this action is an attempt by some of Hollywood’s titans to guarantee their position in that future.
Chad Hummel, a principal at the McKool Smith law firm’s Los Angeles office, described it as a “finally” moment. Giants in the entertainment industry had previously remained silent while academics showed how AI systems could produce content that appeared to be infringing. They have now made a significant entry into the conflict.
One of the few AI generators that has captivated the world’s attention is Midjourney, which allows users to create visuals whenever they want. What began as a novelty swiftly became into a significant source of online material as users created everything from jokes to pornography to reimaginings of well-known TV and movie characters using Midjourney and other generators like OpenAI’s Sora and Stable Diffusion.
However, the artificial intelligence models are taught by consuming millions of words and images from the internet, including copyrighted content from individual artists and entertainment studios, so the final images are not created in a vacuum. AI businesses assert that their generators are producing completely original works and that the training data is protected by copyright law as “fair use.” Midsize media companies and artists have retaliated, claiming that the AI is stealing their creations.
Midjourney is described as “a bottomless pit of plagiarism” in Disney and Universal’s complaint, which frames the problem as one of good versus evil. Advocates for the AI sector respond that traditional media firms are obstructing a technology breakthrough that has the potential to unleash a creative surge.
On Wednesday, a request for comment from Midjourney was not answered.
By offering an AI image service that “works as a virtual vending machine, generating unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works,” Midjourney “seeks to reap the rewards” of Disney’s creative work, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
It’s true that AI-generated content using well-known, trademarked characters like Mario, Shrek, or Winnie the Pooh has been making the rounds online. It has occasionally gone viral on social media and inspired a new kind of fan art. For example, fans of Star Wars no longer need to search the internet for images and stories about their favorite characters; instead, they can utilize an AI video generator to produce an original 11-minute Star Wars film featuring lifelike locations and characters.
The Washington Post’s studies revealed that AI video is still not sufficiently advanced to create watchable full-length movies or TV series.
According to Cornell University law expert James Grimmelmann, this may be the reason copyright holders took their time bringing legal action against AI video creators. He claimed that while AI audio can already create songs that sound like they were created by a human, AI video hasn’t advanced to that point. Sora from OpenAI, for instance, can only produce content that is about a minute long. Grimmelmann further claims that while the speed and fluidity are a notable increase over previous models, they do not provide the specific controls that studios and directors want.
However, preproduction brainstorming, special effects, and on-screen visuals are already being handled by production companies employing AI. Since the initial release of OpenAI’s picture generator DALL-E in 2021, the quality of AI-generated material has significantly increased, and firms such as Google and OpenAI are now providing video generators to an audience. Many people think that fully AI-generated entertainment will soon be incorporated into mainstream society. In addition to agreements with voice AI companies that permit actors to license their voices, SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents actors in movies and television shows, also reached a tentative agreement this week with a group of video game companies to compensate actors whose voices or likenesses appear in AI-generated games.
The union wrote in a blog post on Monday that “patience and persistence have led to a deal that puts in place the necessary A.I. guardrails that defend performers’ livelihoods in the A.I. age.”
However, Hollywood studios are already collaborating with a new generation of AI start-ups, like Moonvalley and Runway, to incorporate AI into the production process, according to the companies.
Artists, writers, and media businesses are among the many rightsholders that have filed the most recent complaint accusing AI companies of infringement. One of the most well-known cases is the one the New York Times brought against ChatGPT’s creator, OpenAI. Meanwhile, many are contracting with AI companies for multimillion-dollar license agreements that give them complete access to their information in exchange for a fee.
In contrast to past claims, the Disney and Universal action demands that Midjourney filter the content it produces rather than completely ignoring the companies’ intellectual property.
According to Grimmelmann, this one appears to be more focused on setting the kind of standards that copyright holders have for non-AI platforms: You must remove obvious duplicates of our works.
Hummel claims that the ability of tech companies to remove the film studios from the equation by using their work to train models without charging for it is what the studios don’t want.
“Hollywood is not going to try to stop generative AI,” Hummel stated. “It’s about compensation.”
Many visual artists are already feeling the effects of artificial intelligence, according to Jon Lam, a video game artist and creators rights campaigner. He stated that he has seen his professional contacts struggle to obtain work when AI can reproduce several art styles with the click of a mouse. Wednesday’s lawsuit was “a huge confidence boost” for creatives like Lam, who are looking for an upset that will prevent film, television, and video game studios from using artists’ work without paying them, he added.
A victory for Disney and Universal wouldn’t guarantee shield entertainment industry artists from AI replacement, according to Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago computer science professor who co-founded Glaze, a program that shields visual creation from AI imitation. However, it might significantly reduce the amount of data AI technologies can use, he noted. Zhao claimed that in the absence of new data, AI generators would repeatedly reproduce the same visual concepts, which would reduce their utility for production firms. That’s why AI businesses and entertainment studios both depend on artists who create new work and earn a living.
It would be impossible to develop tools like ChatGPT if they couldn’t be trained on copyrighted data, according to some executives in the IT sector. They also contend that requiring AI businesses to compensate all creators would halt the development of AI, which has enormous potential for economic gain.
According to Adam Eisgrau, who heads a program on AI, creativity, and copyright for the Chamber of Progress, a center-left trade group that supports digital businesses like Midjourney, studios like Disney and Universal should embrace AI video instead of litigating to halt it.
“I think the film industry has a long history and a short memory,” Eisgrau remarked. “Lucky for them,” he added, because they ended up making a lot of money off the technology, he said, comparing the litigation to one that took place ten years earlier when studios sued the makers of videocassette players and lost.
Fans of the technology are paying close attention to every advancement in AI video in the meanwhile. The Reddit community r/aivideo featured a brief teaser for a fictional film on Sunday. The visuals were very comparable to those of science fiction shows like Star Wars.
“Please turn this into a feature film. It would be freaking crazy,” one commenter said.
“That’s the plan!” replied the poster.
