Two huge movie studios are suing Midjourney, claiming the firm’s AI has been trained on their copyrighted material – the entrance of the Hollywood giants into this legal fight could be a watershed mom

So Hollywood is finally making a move to try to protect intellectual property from generative AI. Disney and Universal have together filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, the company behind one of the most popular AI image generators, over rip offs of characters and art styles from the likes of The Simpsons and Star Wars.

Disney and Universal are the first major Hollywood studios to file copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies, marking a pivotal moment in the ongoing fight by artists, newspapers and content makers to stop AI firms from using their work as training data.

Shrek is one of the properties that is being cited as part of Midjourney’s infringement offenses, as well as Marvel characters, Star Wars characters, Despicable Me’s iconic Minions, and others. According to a BlueSky user who combed through the docs, there are over 30 comparisons between studio artwork and Midjourney outputs .

"Piracy is piracy, and the fact that it's done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing," said Disney general counsel Horacio Gutierrez in a statement. The studios claim Midjourney downloaded copyrighted content from the Internet using "bots, scrapers, streamrippers, video downloaders, and web crawlers" to train its AI model.