Disney and Universal sue Midjourney, call it “a bottomless pit of plagiarism”

In the first major legal showdown between giant Hollywood studios and an AI company, Disney and Universal are suing Midjourney, an AI photo generation firm, for plagiarism.

Like most AI image generators, Midjourney enables users to create realistic-looking images from a text prompt in just a few seconds. It’s certainly one of the most popular tools out there.

But the movie companies say that Midjourney illegally trained its AI models on their intellectual property and now generates images featuring their famous characters – like Shrek, Darth Vader, or Spider-Man – violating copyright law.

“For more than 100 years, Disney and Universal have delighted audiences around the world by investing in and fostering American creative innovation and producing some of the greatest motion pictures and fictional characters of all time,” reads the complaint filed in California federal court.

“Midjourney, however, seeks to reap the rewards of Plaintiffs’ creative investment by selling an artificial intelligence image-generating service that functions as a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works.”

The 110-page lawsuit also contends that Midjourney, a service that has tens of millions of registered users, blatantly “helped itself to countless” copyrighted works to train its software.

“Midjourney is the quintessential copyright freerider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the companies say in the lawsuit.

Midjourney and other AI firms were sued in a separate case by a group of visual artists in 2023. The companies have sought to dismiss it but the case is currently in discovery.

Besides, court evidence revealed in early 2024 that Midjourney used a database of 16,000 artists to train its model and even discussed ways to avoid legal problems online.

But this is the first time major Hollywood studios have sued an AI company. Disney’s chief legal and compliance officer Horacio Gutierrez told CNN: “Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”

In response to the 2023 lawsuit, Midjourney argued that any single image created by AI “comprises an infinitesimal fragment of a model’s training, just as each visual (every face, sunset, painting) an artist has ever perceived and every text a writer has ever read comprises a tiny fraction of the content and imagery that inform their imagination.”

Disney and Universal are seeking $150,000 per infringed work. More than 150 works are listed as exhibits in the complaint, meaning that damages from the lawsuit could top $20 million.