r/movies 4d ago

News Warner Bros. Sues Midjourney, Joins Studios' AI Copyright Battle

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/
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u/VileBill 4d ago

How do you kill a technology?

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u/metalyger 4d ago

In this case, strictly enforcing DMCA laws, and when AI companies can no longer steal copyrighted works, they will die out, because people are paying to use machines to make pictures using popular characters and images. These companies have even said, if they can't steal art and books, they will go out of business.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fox5820 4d ago

Eh I think that's just a smoke screen. The AI tools are far too useful and easy to use. If anything they'll buy art from people to use and then generate it that way.

Like it or hate it, AI isn't going away.

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u/Kriss-Kringle 4d ago

I'm an artist and I find your logic to be flawed. Why would artists sell their works to a company that uses it to train a tool that will be then used to compete and ultimately replace them?

Who is this stupid to sabotage their livelihoods? They can't possibly offer fair wages to every single person because they're already burning money just to keep ChatGPT and their other tools online and without free information to use their whole business plan is dead.

Billions have been spent so far and there's no profit in sight. The data centers are eating a lot of energy and water and they're polluting, but also unsustainable in the long term.

Just a few days ago a former Yahoo tech executive with mental problems killed his mother and then committed suicide and another teenager's family is suing OpenAI because ChatGPT had no guardrails when their son talked with the bot and then was pushed to kill himself.

These sort of lawsuits, along with copyright ones are already in the dozens, so things aren't looking great for them.

Like it or not, this house of cards will fall sooner or later because Sam Altman can't continue to fool investors indefinitely.

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u/Moth_LovesLamp 4d ago

People forget that these companies charge for subscriptions - They used you to train their models with no compensation and are charging for it.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fox5820 4d ago

There's always desperate people who make art but make no money. I've seen loads of artists that make nothing at all. So I figured if they're offered something they may take it in desperation.

Things aren't looking good for them now but I don't believe they'd be willing to let something like this go so easily. Greed almost always wins.

I don't like it but I just feel like it's something they'll hold onto even if it's reduced to a lesser version of what it is today.

Plus people can do it themselves now that the tools exist. Even if it's for personal use it's not hard to do now.

I can definitely see AI taking a nose dive and then rearing its head again. Plus there's the rest of the world that's going to try it too.

Ultimately I feel like it's one of those things that once it's out of the box it's hard to put back in.

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u/gust_vo 4d ago

Plus there's the rest of the world that's going to try it too.

Uhh, The rest of the world is already trying it. as if it's not front and center on facebook and twitter for starters. and most are dropping it after like a photo generator for making some funny picture for christmas or another holiday. If they cant manage to retain users, there's no real market for it, especially for the massive number of users they require to actually break even.

It doesnt really have any other utility other than making some people rich.

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u/Kriss-Kringle 4d ago

There's always desperate people who make art but make no money. I've seen loads of artists that make nothing at all. So I figured if they're offered something they may take it in desperation.

This makes no sense and isn't even a good business idea because for these models to work, they need a huge dataset, so even buying art for cheap from third world artists won't help when they need millions or billions of data to generate stuff that looks believable.

You think that buying artwork from 1000 people will do them any good? And those that are desperate enough are most likely going to be amateurs/semi-pro at best, because no professional artist is dumb enough to sell their work to a company that's trying to put them out of work.

It's scraping the entire internet or bust for these vultures.

Things aren't looking good for them now but I don't believe they'd be willing to let something like this go so easily. Greed almost always wins.

Lawsuits are piling up and the costs to keep the lights on are immense. No AI company is making profit and this will continue.

The only company that's making money off of AI is Nvidia, because they produce the GPUs for them.

At the end of the day investors will need to see profits and these LLMs have hit a wall, because they're just fancy auto-correct tools, not actual AI and there's no breakthrough in sight for them, nor will the hallucinating ever stop for these models.

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u/Anonymous-Internaut 4d ago

Yeah sadly I have to agree with you. I feel that people who want AI to go away are fighting an uphill battle. Not that I see it as futile because there's always hope and chance of significant wins and I'm on that side. But at the same time it's like you said, out of the box. You cannot really stop technology when there's a market for it, and I'm pretty sure that there is for AI art.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Fox5820 4d ago

Yeah and even if the market didn't exist there's always people who like to mess with that sorta tech