Warner Bros. Discovery is suing a prominent artificial intelligence image generator for copyright infringement, escalating a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.

The lawsuit accuses Midjourney, which has millions of registered users, of building its business around the mass theft of content. The company “brazenly dispenses Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property” by letting subscribers produce images and videos of iconic copyrighted characters, alleges the complaint, filed on Thursday in California federal court.

“The heart of what we do is develop stories and characters to entertain our audiences, bringing to life the vision and passion of our creative partners,” said a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson in a statement. “Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.”

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It’s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.

Warner Bros. Discovery joins Disney and Universal, which earlier this year teamed up to sue Midjourney. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their movies and TV shows.

Warner Bros. Discovery Sues Midjourney for Infringement In Major Legal Battle

Oops wrong thread.

Doesn't seem like there's much middle ground in the generative AI space. You either need to be a major tech company (or owned by one) that can afford to own all your training data and/or fight off any lawsuit or small and decentralized enough to not become a target of them (the open source route). Not much in between. Midjourney's days may be numbered unless they get bought up by someone bigger.

Probably too optimistic, but it would be nice to set some kind of legal precedent that you can't just steal someone's intellectual property/creative works through AI.

Generative AI is effectively theft in the way it takes from other people's art without permission.

The worst of all with these AI companies is that they want people whom they've stolen data from to pay when accessing their data. There should be a precedence set for them.