Could This Latest Midjourney Lawsuit Spell The End For Generative AI Video As We Know It?

Warner Bros. Discovery Sues Midjourney

As thoroughly outlined in the original Hollywood Reporter article, and as we summed up yesterday, this lawsuit is calling out Midjourney for “brazen” IP theft. At the heart of the lawsuit is the claim that Midjourney has used others’ intellectual property (in this case, specifically, Warner Bros. Discover’s IP) to train its generative AI models.

“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. Midjourney is blatantly and purposefully infringing copyrighted works, and we filed this suit to protect our content, our partners, and our investments.” — a statement made by a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson (via THR).

And the evidence against Midjourney is pretty damning as Warner Bros. Discovery brings the receipts with examples of Midjourney AI generations of iconic copyrighted characters, which, the lawsuit claims, would only be possible if Midjourney’s models were trained on copyright-protected promotional materials.

The Future State of Generative AI

If you’ve been following the AI news lately, this battle has been a long time coming. And it has been heating up as of late, as we’ve also seen another bombshell joint lawsuit filed by Disney and NBCUniversal back in June.

Yet, as mentioned above, this lawsuit might be bigger as Midjourney doesn’t have the protection of a major tech giant behind it in the same way as other generative AI models. Google or Meta, for example, might be able to settle things out of court and come to a new solution for moving forward.

The other major story here is, of course, the ethics of it all. In the early days of AI, few knew what it was or how it worked. As such, there weren’t many voices speaking up for ethical AI and questions about what content models were trained on.

In the past year or so, we’ve seen major brands like Adobe make conscious efforts to outline how they train their models and provide reassurances that footage and content uploaded by users on their servers won’t be part of any AI training without a user’s consent.

Ethical AI Alternatives

We’ve also seen new AI video models introduced by the likes of Asteria with Marey, which has been making a name for itself as the first ethically trained AI model on the market.

Ultimately, though, we’ll keep tabs on how this latest lawsuit evolves and what repercussions, if any, come from it for generative AI models like Midjourney. Even with harsh results, it’s doubtful the AI industry will ever fall off or disappear. The cat’s already out of the bag for it, so to speak.

But hopefully, these lawsuits and a loud voice in support of artists will help push the industry into a better space with better ethics and more clearly defined boundaries that protect artists’ works and rights.