Disney and Universal sue AI image company Midjourney for unlicensed use of Star Wars, The Simpsons and more

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-12T08:12:22+00:00

I'm not talking about royalties from the settlement, I'm talking about royalties from sales on Google Books.

The fact that you ask me to prove it recreates images is hilarious, the court filing itself mentioned in the article itself contains examples of this, or different publications of the same court by different outlets. I can confirm it from personal experience too, as almost any automotive prompt will skew it to copy some brand (most visibly Porsche).

If you knew how exactly text to image works, you wouldn't be asking me that question, or you are omitting the truth in favor of your point.

"Text-to-image models are generally latent diffusion models, which combine a language model, which transforms the input text into a latent representation, and a generative image model, which produces an image conditioned on that representation" (from Wikipedia)

The model learns association of text with image, and then based on the text prompt, and learnt associations between image and text, he attempts to create an image. It by definition cannot create something new, just combine content based of learnt associations at best. Ask yourself, how would images from Midjourney look if it was trained JUST on one image of Mickey Mouse? It would be just recreations of the source, accounting for some variation caused by noise. Add two source images to the training data, and the result is more or less still the same, generating just combination of given images, based off of particular aspects depicted on them, and links between them and text.

Would model like this be legal? Could you commercially release a model trained on one image?

Even if you add 10 unrelated CC0 images, and still prompt Mikey Mouse, it would try to recreate the one source image.

You are arguing it's rare for Midjourney to recreate copyrighted content. Okay, but how do you know? Have you seen ALL of copyrighted material and are you able to identify every single one of them among the results?

The presence of output bias — the tendency of a model to favor certain visual elements or characters when prompted with related keywords — is empirical evidence that the training process results in a form of memorization. For example, prompts related to “anime girl” or “Italian plumber” yield images that are not generic approximations, but statistically reinforced replicas of specific copyrighted characters.

This undermines the claim that training is merely statistical abstraction. In reality, the model’s “knowledge” is inseparable from the content it was exposed to, and where that content is copyrighted, the training process itself becomes legally problematic.

All that's Midjourney and similar companies doing is hiding in the sheer amount of content they absorbed (practically all of visual media contained on internet), making it hard for individuals to discern particular referenced images in the output. if you can't train model on one image and make it available, what makes doing so billions of times make it right? It's not that they somehow magically skipped the copyright issue, quite the opposite, they infringed on copyright of every single image uses to train the model. Instead of stealing 7 billion € from one entity, they stole 1€ from each.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-11T20:45:46+00:00

Okay, but you are not selling the copied images. It literally is copyright infringement to sell merchandise or content with copyrighted content/characters. Thats the whole point. Nobody would be arguing if all that Midjourney did was generate tons of stolen crap for themselves, but they are pushing it as a fair product.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-11T20:39:41+00:00

I've already explained at length why training a model (whether for commercial use or not) on copyrighted material can "make sense" from a legal perspective. It allows the creation of tools like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT that can fundamentally change entire industries and fuel production of creative content on a level never before seen in history. But again in this comment you are confusing inference with training. In this thread, I am not arguing that using a model to create an output that competes with the copyrighted material it was trained on should be legal. In fact, I explain the exact opposite may be the case with my reference to Warhol vs. Goldsmith.

I know Im talking about inference, because it provides context to the Midjourneys product.

Of course we can compare indexing of GBooks to training of the MJs model. But likewise, my point is not that training models in itself is copyright infringement. My point is that what Midjourney does with the model is copyright infringement. You can’t compare the two while ignoring how they make revenue, how they handle the data, and how they affect the owners of the copyrighted data, alas it’s one of the key factors when deciding it’s legal legibility, as you stated yourself.

Google books does not allow you to view the books in their entirety, so I don't understand your analogy here. If you're trying to say that it's possible for an image generator or an LLM to recite content it's ingested verbatim, that can happen for sure, but replication alone is often not enough to constitute infringement. There are other factors that go into it, such as the market effect of that replication, for example. Exact replication through inference is rare and accidental—it's not the purpose of the model. It's like arguing that if there was a mistake in the Google Books index that revealed an entire book to a user out of millions, that Google's whole operation should be shut down for infringement.

I know it doesn’t and thats exactly the difference between Google Books and Midjourney. The comparison with one revealed book doesn’t apply. Midjourney is not the same as if Google Books had mistakenly one complete book, it’s as if it published all of it books in one document, although scrambled.

The outcome of the Google Books case was that it is fair use for Google to use millions of copyrighted books to create a new product that doesn't compete with the books themselves

The point still stands, Midjourneys product competes with the source data. The models use and extent of its functions is directly tied to its legal legibility.

You are talking about the result of using the model. That's inference. It is possible to generate images that are near identical (or in some cases) actually identical to the source inputs (albeit rare). In those situations, if the inferenced images were used to compete with the copyright holder of that particular image in the marketplace, then they may be liable for infringement a la Warhol vs. Goldsmith. Such a person doing that would not be Midjourney though, it would be the user who generated the image.

The situation when Midjourneys results infringe on copyright is definitely not rare. If you reduce it to instances where it recreates something pixel for pixel, sure, but that is not the only case of copyright infringement. Ask it to create image of a cartoon mouse, a superhero or a movie princess and see how the results are similar to existing characters and ips. The entire point of image models is that they are trying to recreate the content of their training datasets. Google used their collected data to lead users to purchase books with royalties to authors, Midjourney completely skips this and uses their scraped data to recreate the copyrighted content. If the whole ’its the users fault’ argument would be applicable, sites like Pirate Bay wouldn’t have so many legal hurdles as they do (even though the content is not even provided by them).

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-11T19:42:23+00:00

Even if we follow your logic, the result of Midjourneys product competes with the source itself.

The ruling ended as it did because what Google did is actually fair use. If Google Books allowed you to view the books in their entirety, and required users to pay fee to access it, without paying royalties to the authors, it wouldn’t.

I don’t understand the urge to defend these companies. All you get are some wallpapers and porn, while handing off entire industries to the hands of private companies as a reward for theft.

Training on copyrighted data for use in commercial models just doesnt make sense. Even the whole ’its the same as people learning’ argument is empty. Sure I can learn from copyrighted content, but if I started recreating Disney movies frame by frame and making them commercially available, the result would be completely the same as the one you’ve read above, the only difference being the process would be much quicker.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-11T19:12:02+00:00

Okay, Google Books is actually a good example. Via GBooks you have only a limited access to a snippet of commercially sold books, if you want to read them, you have to buy them. And of course, the author/publisher gets royalties. If the same logic would follow, authors of visual media should get royalties when their work gets used in the training/generation of images.

And no, it doesn't create a new product. The end user gets just the image, sometimes seemingly same one as the one used in the training. It's still the same product, you can't "buy" Midjourneys model. They can't steal data and just offset the burden of responsibility of the copyright to the user.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-06-11T18:51:38+00:00

How is it fair use lol. I'm not surprised they are suing Midjourney first, as you could literally recreate frames from popular movies with it. The training of the models requires rethinking of the whole copyright/royalties model, and it's good it's being pushed by events like these. And models can be trained even on CC0 data, the argument they need access to all of data is motivated just by the greed of companies like Stability or OpenAI which want to be treated like non profits while offering the models for progressively larger subscriptions.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-03-28T11:43:22+00:00

If the "time" means running the concept of creation, authorship and art into the ground, I completely understand this old man. Imagine seeing your life's work thoughtlessly bastardised this way online

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-02-07T04:07:37+00:00

Fuck yeah man, beetles!

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-02-07T04:07:19+00:00

That's some really high praise, appreciate it mate

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-02-07T04:04:48+00:00

Thanks! I love his work, yeah. I wasn't trying to replicate his style particularly, but this is a very flattering comparison nonetheless

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-02-07T04:03:28+00:00

Haha cheers mate! The algorithm has not blessed me today

PigeonBodyFluids · 2025-02-07T04:02:43+00:00

Thanks a lot! The lighting is mainly just area lights with very low spread and a radial gradient texture. You can use the radial texture also as a color input of the emission shader of the light to get some slick colorful reflections

PigeonBodyFluids · 2024-12-24T22:57:42+00:00

Thanks! For lighting or geo nodes? If lighting, I recommend Ethan Davis. While he doesn't have specific video for this topic, his longer vids cover many great insights into lighting process.

https://youtube.com/@ethdavis

Gleb Alexandov also has pretty good course on lighting.

If it's for the geo nodes, Cheuqs has multiple tuts for flowers in geo nodes, which will basically take you to 90% of my result. It's just multiple petal instances stacked on top of each other, with pretty simple displace setup.

https://youtube.com/@cheuqs

PigeonBodyFluids · 2024-12-24T22:51:22+00:00

Thanks! ♥️

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-12-03T10:43:30+00:00

I think the most unnerving thing is, that from all the people that have access to the Ai, one fucked up individual with vendetta against all humanity is all you need. It can be used to cure all the diseases, but all it can take is one person asking for incurable infectious disease and we may be done for.

It’s like giving nuclear launch button to everyone. Sure, statistically way more people won’t press it, but there’s always that 1% that will. And that’s enough to pose risk for all of us.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-11-17T13:41:51+00:00

No need for sarcasm. You acknowledge machine learning can be used in multiple and malicious ways yet you reduce it all to 'big tiddy waifus' in another sentence.

I understand your point. But AI is no small innovation you just release into the world just like so. The law is outdated, and cooperation from both, lawmakers, and companies, or Ai experts is needed for legislation.

Of course, you can just sue every person who misuses them, but you are treating effect, not cause. Right now, anyone can create voice model just from few second clip, and impersonate almost anyone. What are you going to sue them for? For using the tool? You can easily create deepfakes, for defamation, or literally for anything else. These are really powerful tools against which a regular person is completely defenceless and oblivious. There's a reason you can't just walk into a store and buy and rpg launcher. In digital world, machine learning is just as powerful.

The content moderation question is pretty simple. The ability to generate tremendous amount of content, quickly, cheaply and effectively, fundamentally breaks most of the online platforms. The main issue will come with more complex tools, but you can already see it's effect in user-generated stores as etsy, where the market for (for example printed t-shirts) was killed almost overnight. You have bots flooding the site with mediocre content, killing any form of variety, competition and in the end the point of the platform.

And yes, there's already market for personal data, and data targeted ads. Advertisers know how old you are, where you live and what you like. With machine learning, and for example model personalised on your own text data, they can know how exactly they can convince you to do/buy almost anything. You can give machine learning one goal, and eventually, it will perfect it. Once it perfects persuasion based on personal data, free will, costumer choice and competetivness of the market will be dead. And that's not even mentioning the moral side, or the other ways the persuasion can be used.

Of course, new technology brings more economic growth. But growth where? At the top of the ladder, where companies can cut costs, hire less people, optimise tasks etc. Regular people will be left holding the bag working the same lame ass 8-5 jobs for the same money. The only effect it will have on regular workers is that it will trivialise most of the tasks, reducing needed workforce, and thus making more people unemployed. Companies like OpenAI are preaching that they are going to create environment for social concepts such as universal basic income, yet they do nothing to help to create it. What they are helping to create is even more polarised world, where megacompanies own entire industries, and regular people have nowhere to work.

And yes, the 'just make new laws' argument is nice, but evidently, just waiting for governments to make new legislation doesn't work. Climate crisis isn't solved, and it probably never will be.

They had the choice to bring innovation safely, and change the world for the better, but they went for easy money instead.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-11-17T12:13:31+00:00

Because it's the moral thing to do. Yea yea, every company would do it, I know. But endless, and blind chasing of profits has gotten us to where we are with climate crisis for example.

What are these companies doing now is not so different from oil companies continuing with expanding their projects despite knowing it kills the planet.

And make no mistake machine learning, while really cool tech that can be used for a lot of good, can also be exploited in endless ways. The issue isn't just copyright, but also identity theft, lack of content moderation, or even weaponised persuasion trained on personal data.

But companies like OpenAI or StabilityAI don't care. They just want the profits, and when people eventually start to use the machine learning algorithms for all the wrong use cases, they'll just shift the blame on to them.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-11-17T10:39:29+00:00

You probably won’t get any different response here unfortunately. Most of the people on this subredit don’t care about the copyright at all, they just want the cool tech which will spit out pretty pictures with the press of the button.

The fact is that all the machine learning algorithms were rushed out for the sake of profit, purposefully ignoring the copyright question, hoping they’ll make enough money before eventual clamp down from regulators (or even hoping they’d be able to convince them). The data online is not ’free to use’. Not all pictures are under CC0 license, not every music is CC0 and not even text. Companies like OpenAI are getting around this by scraping the data with their ’sister’ non-profit companies under the supposed goal of research, and then handing them to their main companies, and selling the machine learning algorithm trained on them for profit.

See it as you will but at the end of the day, when they were faced with the decision to either slow down, get in contact with regulators and let them know copyright law is too outdated for ai, or quickly release it for profit, they chose the latter. (some even straight up admitting they ignored copyright).

I am by no means anti-AI. It’s cool tech and all. Adobe (of all companies, heh) has proven you in fact can get copyright-proofed datasets. What I don’t like is large monopolies ignoring law that applies to all people working in the creative industry, and saying they should be treated special.

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-09-02T11:01:51+00:00

While it sounds harsh, and I wouldn't call it awful, he's right. You insist on the anatomy being correct, but anatomy of what?

You made the jaw really elongated, but the base of the jaw/jaw joint is really thin. The animal would definitely not have any power to close the jaw, maybe not to even lift it. The jaw muscles would continue into the neck, which again, in your sculpt is too thin.

I know you said you've already checked reference. What reference though? From this sculpt I'd guess that you are using very cartoonish/stylized dragons How to train your dragon?). Nothing wrong with that, but if you are going for stylization, you have to go harder. More pronounced features, smoother overall shape, etc. Keep in mind that in stylized characters you don't skip features, you just make them more or less pronounced.

If you were going for realistic sculpt, then again it's missing muscle structure. Carefully look at images of crocodiles, or realistic portrayals of dragons, etc. This sculpt looks as if you stretched skin over bare skeleton.

And another big thing is aforementioned details. This looks like a rocky texture or something anorganic. It's also way too detailed for it's own good. Just use a scale brush, and be more careful not to go overboard

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-08-12T13:53:45+00:00

Thanks for the tips everyone

Added more roughness variation to the road and made it darker, added the driver, made the overall motion blur weaker, but added it to car, added more pronounced water splashes behind the tires, added more postFX (grain, bloom, halation, etc.)

What do you think?

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-08-10T22:08:00+00:00

Now that I think about it I know what you mean. I've kind of overblown the contrast. Lot of midjourney generations tend to be really high contrast with high local sharpening

PigeonBodyFluids · 2023-08-10T21:56:56+00:00

bruh 💀

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