On Wednesday, Disney and NBCUniversal filed a lawsuit against AI image-synthesis company Midjourney, accusing the company of copyright infringement for allowing users to create images of characters like Darth Vader and Shrek, reports The Hollywood Reporter. The complaint, filed in US District Court in Los Angeles, marks the first major legal action by Hollywood studios against a generative AI company.
Midjourney is a subscription image-synthesis service and community that allows its users to submit written descriptions called prompts to an AI model that generates new images based on them. It has been well-known for years that AI image-synthesis models such as the ones that power Midjourney have been trained on copyrighted artworks without rights holder permission.
The lawsuit describes San Francisco-based Midjourney as a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" that enables users to generate what the studios call "AI slop"—personalized images of copyrighted characters. Disney Enterprises, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century, Universal City Studios Productions, and DreamWorks Animation joined forces in the legal filing.
"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.
The complaint includes dozens of visual examples showing Midjourney's outputs alongside the original copyrighted characters. According to the filing, users can simply type prompts like "Darth Vader at the beach" and receive "high quality, downloadable" images featuring Disney's copyrighted character. The studios provided evidence showing AI-generated versions of Yoda, Wall-E, Stormtroopers, Minions, and characters from How to Train Your Dragon.
The legal action follows similar moves in other creative industries, with more than a dozen major news companies suing AI company Cohere in February over copyright concerns. In 2023, a group of visual artists sued Midjourney for similar reasons.
Studios claim Midjourney knows what it’s doing
Beyond allowing users to create these images, the studios argue that Midjourney actively promotes copyright infringement by displaying user-generated content featuring copyrighted characters in its "Explore" section. The complaint states this curation "show[s] that Midjourney knows that its platform regularly reproduces Plaintiffs' Copyrighted Works."
The studios also allege that Midjourney has technical protection measures available that could prevent outputs featuring copyrighted material but has "affirmatively chosen not to use copyright protection measures to limit the infringement." They cite Midjourney CEO David Holz admitting the company "pulls off all the data it can, all the text it can, all the images it can" for training purposes.
According to Axios, Disney and NBCUniversal attempted to address the issue with Midjourney before filing suit. While the studios say other AI platforms agreed to implement measures to stop IP theft, Midjourney "continued to release new versions of its Image Service" with what Holz allegedly described as "even higher quality infringing images."
"We are bringing this action today to protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content," said Kim Harris, NBCUniversal's executive vice president and general counsel, in a public statement.
This lawsuit signals a new front in Hollywood's conflict over AI. Axios highlights this shift: While actors and writers have fought to protect their name, image, and likeness from studio exploitation, now the studios themselves are taking on tech companies over intellectual property concerns. Other major studios, including Amazon, Netflix, Paramount Pictures, Sony, and Warner Bros., have not yet joined the lawsuit, though they share membership with Disney and Universal in the Motion Picture Association.
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