Midjourney accused of 'Bottomless Plagiarism' in landmark AI lawsuit by Disney and Universal

A lawsuit filed in a California district court by Disney and NBCUniversal has claimed that the popular generative artificial intelligence program and service, Midjourney, has claimed the company behind the tool has continuously violated both companies' intellectual rights>

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The lawsuit accuses Midjourney of ignoring its previous requests to stop violating its intellectual property rights, which Disney and NBCUniversal have traced back to its generative AI tools, such as image generation, More specifically, the lawsuit provided an example of how it believes Midjourney is violating intellectual property rights, such as the AI tool enabling users to generate an image of Disney-owned "Star Wars" character Darth Vadar in a variety of different settings and performing particular actions. The AI "obliges by generating and displaying a high-quality, downloadable image."

Disney and NBCUniversal are framing the lawsuit against Midjourney as a stance on protecting the "hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us," with Disney's chief legal compliance officer, Horacio Gutierrez saying in a statement, "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."

"Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism," the complaint reads

Additionally, the lawsuit states Disney and NBCUniversal found it was "easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts related to commercial films." Naming IP such as Marvel superheroes, and Nintendo's Super Mario.

Lawsuits such as this were inevitable, as there isn't a clear legal precedent for AI-powered tools being able to create content such as images or video that depict copyrighted IP. Questions such as how much of the image/video needs to be altered for the created content not to violate copyright laws.

"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," said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney's chief legal and compliance officer. "But piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing."