Disney, Universal sue image creator Midjourney for copyright infringement

Walt Disney and Comcast's Universal filed a copyright lawsuit against Midjourney on Wednesday, calling its popular AI-powered image generator a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” for its use of the studios’ best-known characters.

- DAWN CHMIELEWSKI

The suit, filed in federal district court in Los Angeles, claims Midjourney pirated the libraries of the two Hollywood studios, making and distributing without permission “innumerable” copies of characters such as Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, and the Minions from Despicable Me.

The studios claim the San Francisco company rebuffed their request to stop infringing their copyrighted works or, at a minimum, take technological measures to halt the creation of these AI-generated characters.

Instead, the studios argue, Midjourney continued to release new versions of its AI image service that boast higher quality infringing images.

Midjourney recreates animated images from a typed request, or prompt.