Midjourney wants Hollywood studios to reveal the details of their AI usage

As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is trying to force these studios to reveal how they use AI themselves.

Disney and Universal sued Midjourney last year for alleged copyright infringement, noting that the startup’s image generation models could create images of characters, such as Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, owned by the studios. A few months later, Warner Bros. sued. Midjourney also on.

The startup states that training its AI models on images of copyrighted characters is allowed under fair use.

The current dispute centers on the documentation the studios must produce during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that the studios would indeed have to provide information about their generative AI use – but only if it led to ‘consumer-facing’ videos and images.

In his last fileMidjourney is seeking to overturn that restriction, arguing that it “improperly” allows the studios to “select only those documents they believe support their market harm claims, while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defense.”

Midjourney further claims that the “documents [the studios] they are withholding are the very things that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are accusing Midjourney of doing.”

For example, the startup says that if the studios develop image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboarding or devising content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry practice, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.”

In the filing, the startup also argues that the studios must disclose all of the clues they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting results, and not just the clues that produced the allegedly infringing footage.

The studios’ lead attorney David Singer previously claimed that Midjourney was looking for this documentation as part of a ‘fishing expedition’.

He also said that the studios are “not trying to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s operations,” but rather “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their films and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly showing, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that contain copies of [their] famous characters without permission.”