Disney takes on AI image generator Midjourney in scathing suit

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in a Los Angeles federal court, entertainment giants Disney and Comcast’s Universal have teamed up to take on Midjourney, the generative AI image platform, accusing it of copyright infringement on a massive scale.

The at-times blunt lawsuit doesn’t mince words, arguing that Midjourney is a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The complaint claims Midjourney effectively raided the studios’ libraries, illegally training its AI to generate uncanny recreations of iconic characters like Star Wars’ Darth Vader and Frozen’s Elsa, without so much as a licensing deal or permission. NBCUniversal’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Kim Harris, told Reuters the case is about protecting “the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”

By helping itself to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, and then distributing images (and soon videos) that blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters—without investing a penny in their creation—Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit argues, according to a copy of the suit obtained by Deadline. “Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing. Midjourney’s conduct misappropriates Disney’s and Universal’s intellectual property and threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”

Mashable recently tested the top AI image generators, and our testing revealed that Midjourney readily produced deepfake images featuring a recognizable Disney character. In fact, every single AI image generator we tested produced a similar deepfake with little to no resistance.

Midjourney’s legal defense isn’t off to a promising start, either. The suit cites a 2022 Forbes interview in which Midjourney founder David Holz casually admitted that the company doesn’t bother getting consent from living artists or anyone whose work remains under copyright. The quote, now immortalized in the court filing, could come back to haunt the AI company.

"There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from," the founder told Forbes. "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."

This isn’t Midjourney’s first brush with legal heat. A year ago, a federal judge in California found that a group of 10 artists suing Midjourney, Stability AI, and others had plausibly argued their copyrighted work was scraped, stored, and potentially monetized without approval. That lawsuit is still making its way through the courts, as are similar suits against OpenAI and Meta. While Disney and Universal are some of the first Hollywood studios to take on the AI industry, the New York Times, along with a growing list of news organizations, has sued OpenAI.

For now, the issue of copyright law and AI training remains in a legal grey area, which means the Disney and Universal lawsuit could have big implications for the wider generative AI field.

Founded in 2021, Midjourney makes money through paid subscriptions and, according to the studios, brought in $300 million in revenue last year.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.