As part of its ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to force those studios to directly disclose how they use AI.
Disney and Universal sued Midjourney last year for copyright infringement, noting that the startup’s image creation model could produce images of characters like Bart Simpson and Darth Vader that the studio owns. A few months later, Warner Bros. also sued Midjourney.
The startup argues that training an AI model with copyrighted character images is permitted under fair use.
The current dispute centers around the documents the studio must produce during the discovery process. The judge previously ruled that studios must actually provide information about their use of generative AI, but only if it results in “consumer-oriented” videos and images.
In its latest filing, Midjourney seeks to overturn those restrictions, arguing that they “unfairly” allow the studio to “select only documents it believes support market harm claims while depriving it of documents that would support Midjourney’s defense.”
Midjourney goes on to claim that “the documents (the studios) are withholding are documents that reveal whether they are secretly doing exactly what they are accusing Midjourney of doing.”
For example, the startup says, if a studio “develops an image-generating AI model for internal use in storyboarding or content ideation for film or TV, the evidence will demonstrate that it is industry practice to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content, even among the studios themselves.”
In the filing, the startup also argues that the studio must disclose all prompts used by Midjourney, as well as the resulting output, as well as the prompts that created the allegedly infringing images.
The studio’s lead attorney, David Singer, previously claimed Midjourney was seeking the documents as part of a “fishing expedition.”
He also said the studio “is not seeking to shut down AI technology or put Midjourney out of business; it just wants Midjourney to stop copying movies and television shows and stop distributing, publicly displaying, performing and creating derivative works of unauthorized copies of its famous characters.”
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