Good news, A.I. haters! Warner Bros. Discovery filed suit Thursday against San Francisco-based Midjourney, making it the latest media company to challenge copyright infringement by the generative A.I. company. Back in June, Disney and Universal teamed up for a similar legal challenge. Midjourney is among the most popular A.I. image generators, with more than 20 million registered users, according to data insights company Demandsage.
In a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, which first reported the news, a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson said, “Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”
In the complaint, Warner Bros. Discovery’s legal team alleges that “Midjourney already possesses the technological means and measures that could prevent its distribution, public display, and public performance of infringing images and videos. But Midjourney has made a calculated and profit-driven decision to offer zero protection to copyright owners even though Midjourney knows about the breathtaking scope of its piracy and copyright infringement.” Elsewhere, they argue, “Evidently, Midjourney will not stop stealing Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property until a court orders it to stop. Midjourney’s large-scale infringement is systematic, ongoing, and willful, and Warner Bros. Discovery has been, and continues to be, substantially and irreparably harmed by it.”
The 101-page document includes dozens of side-by-side screenshots comparing Midjourney-generated images to those by the original creators, featuring iconic characters like Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo, and Bugs Bunny. With few exceptions, the A.I. images are almost indistinguishable from the copyrighted originals.
Warner Bros. seeks to recover all profits Midjourney has made related to its intellectual properties, or alternatively, $150,000 per infringed work. In the case of the latter, that would mean hundreds of TV episodes or comic book images relating to just a single character, which could send damages into the hundreds of millions of dollars.
If this suit — as well as the earlier one put forth by Disney and Universal — reaches the discovery phase, we could learn a lot more about how generative A.I. companies like Midjourney train their models. That’s been a huge grey area for A.I. observers, and a 2022 Verge interview with Midjourney founder David Holz takes on some new meaning in this context.
“Pretty much every big AI model just pulls off all the data it can, all the text it can, all the images it can,” Holz told The Verge. “Scientifically speaking, we’re at an early point in the space, where everyone grabs everything they can, they dump it in a huge file, and they kind of set it on fire to train some huge thing, and no one really knows yet what data in the pile actually matters.”
