Midjourney Calls on Hollywood Studios to Reveal Their AI Practices

In the midst of a legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is urging these studios to reveal their own use of AI technology.

Last year, Disney and Universal initiated a lawsuit against Midjourney, alleging copyright infringements, claiming that the startup’s image-generating models can produce images of characters like Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, which are owned by the studios. Warner Bros. joined the lawsuit a few months later.

Midjourney maintains that using copyrighted character images to train its AI models falls under the fair use doctrine.

The key issue in the case revolves around the evidence that the studios need to provide during the discovery process. A judge has ruled that the studios must disclose information about their generative AI usage, but only if it pertains to “consumer-facing” videos and images.

In its latest filing, Midjourney seeks to contest this limitation, arguing that it “unfairly” allows the studios to “selectively share only the documents that they find beneficial for their claims of market harm, while preventing Midjourney from accessing materials that could support its defenses.”

Midjourney additionally claims that the “documents [the studios] are withholding could indicate whether they are practicing the same activities for which they are suing Midjourney.”

For example, the startup posits that if the studios are developing image-generating AI models “for internal uses such as storyboarding or concept creation for films or TV content, that evidence would show that it is commonplace, even among the studios, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted material.”

Moreover, Midjourney’s filing highlights that studios should disclose all prompts used with Midjourney, along with the resulting outputs, rather than just those that produced the allegedly infringing images.

David Singer, the lead attorney for the studios, previously characterized Midjourney’s request for this documentation as a “fishing expedition.”

He also stated that the studios “are not attempting to hinder AI technology or shut down Midjourney’s operations,” but simply “want Midjourney to stop reproducing their films and TV shows and to refrain from distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works featuring copies of [their] iconic characters without authorization.”