Warner Bros. sues Midjourney alleging the AI image service allowed unauthorized generation of its characters

Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney, alleging the AI image service lets users generate content of its well-known characters without authorization.

The complaint was filed in federal court in Los Angeles, making Warner Bros. the third big studio to bring a case against Midjourney.

The filing says the San Francisco company provides millions of subscribers with tools that can create visuals of protected characters such as Superman, Bugs Bunny, Batman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo, and the Powerpuff Girls. According to Warner Bros., those outputs replicate its works and circulate widely online through Midjourney’s platform.

The studio claims Midjourney built its model using “illegal copies” of Warner Bros. material and encouraged users to make and download images and videos of those characters “in every imaginable scene.” It also says that a broad prompt like “classic comic book superhero battle” produces polished depictions of DC Studios figures, naming Superman, Batman, and Flash.

Warner Bros. characterizes Midjourney’s actions as deliberate, stating “Midjourney thinks it is above the law” and “could easily stop its theft and exploitation,” just as it already restricts content involving violence or nudity. Midjourney did not immediately provide a comment on the allegations.

The complaint says the company’s approach confuses customers about what is legal and what is not.

It says Midjourney misleads subscribers into thinking its massive copying and the many infringing images and videos made by the service are authorized by Warner Bros. Discovery. The studio says it may seek up to $150,000 for each infringed work.

Midjourney has disputed similar claims in the Disney and Universal suit

Walt Disney and Comcast’s Universal filed a copyright lawsuit previously against Midjourney, describing the company’s popular image generator as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism” that feeds off some of their best-known characters.

The complaint, brought in federal district court in Los Angeles, said Midjourney pirated the studios’ libraries and then made and distributed, without permission, “innumerable” copies of protected characters. The filing lists examples that include Darth Vader from “Star Wars,” Elsa from “Frozen,” and the Minions from “Despicable Me.”

Disney’s executive vice president and chief legal officer, Horacio Gutierrez, said in a statement that “We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity, but piracy is piracy, and the fact that it’s done by an AI company does not make it any less infringing.”

NBCUniversal Executive Vice President and General Counsel Kim Harris said the company brought the case to “protect the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”

Midjourney justifies AI training with billions of public images

In an August filing, Midjourney said its system “had to be trained on billions of publicly available images” so it could learn visual concepts and link them to language.

“Training a generative AI model to understand concepts by extracting statistical information embedded in copyrighted works is a quintessentially transformative fair use, a determination resoundingly supported by courts that have considered the issue,” the company wrote, citing recent rulings in cases brought by published authors against Anthropic and Meta.

The company has also said customers are responsible for following its terms of use, which prohibit infringing others’ intellectual property rights.

In a 2022 interview with The Associated Press, CEO David Holz compared the service to something “kind of like a search engine” that draws on a wide set of images across the internet.

“Can a person look at somebody else’s picture and learn from it and make a similar picture?” Holz said. “Obviously, it’s allowed for people… To the extent that AIs are learning like people, it’s sort of the same thing and if the images come out differently then it seems like it’s fine.” He said.

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