Midjourney assays bold "Everybody's doin' it" defense in Disney/Universal/Warner Bros. AI lawsuit

This is per Variety, which reports that the AI company is continuing to try to push a judge in the case to force the studios to talk about their own AI usage, including internal conversations and presentations held about things like storyboarding and ideation. A previous ruling did force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to admit to their own usage of the tech—but only for consumer-facing products, not anything worked on behind closed doors. Midjourney (which has been accused of trying to distract proceedings from the “You fed your computer a million pictures of Superman and then let people ask it to draw them a Superman” of it all) asserts that the studios are using this stuff, too; they’re just being sneakier about it.

The approach speaks to what’s known as an “unclean hands” defense, i.e., the assertion that the person suing you is up to its own brand of nefarious deeds while accusing you of doing the same. To quote Midjourney’s filing: “If Plaintiffs are developing image-generating AI models—trained on unlicensed, third-party copyrighted data—for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.” Of course that is just an “if” at this point, since Midjourney has no proof that any of its accusers are actually sharing in the “fun”; meanwhile, the studio’s lead attorney suggested that all of this is just meant to draw focus from what it views as a pretty simple request, to wit, that the company “Stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of Plaintiffs’ famous characters without authorization.”