"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.

Disney and Universal’s lawsuit isn’t about stopping the technology, experts say. It’s about making sure they get a cut.

Then there’s the other way: With a studio legal victory. The AI models are deemed prohibited from training on this content — this “fair use,” a judge says, ain’t that. In such a scenario we are ensured that for the indefinite future what gets generated in the way of Hollywood images comes from Hollywood and Hollywood alone.

So Hollywood is finally making a move to try to protect intellectual property from generative AI. Disney and Universal have together filed a lawsuit against Midjourney, the company behind one of the most popular AI image generators, over rip offs of characters and art styles from the likes of The Simpsons and Star Wars.

Disney and Universal just sued Midjourney for scraping their IP—ushering in a major showdown over how AI is trained.

Disney and Universal are suing AI photo generation company Midjourney, marking the first major legal showdown between Hollywood studios and an artificial intelligence company.

A rare study out of Hong Kong on screenwriting and AI shows how Chinese screenwriters are applying the technology.

While AI was once seen as a threat in Hollywood, particularly during last year’s writers’ and actors’ strikes, it’s now being recognized for its creative potential.