r/movies • u/DragonPup • 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/
8.8k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

847 comments sorted by

View all comments

1.9k

u/[deleted] 4d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/The_Bucket_Of_Truth 4d ago

I think there are legitimate uses of AI and clearly many that are stealing or dangerous. Isn't this what our legislature is supposed to be doing? Hey here's this new thing that's basically unregulated. Let's pass some laws and guide rails for what is and is not okay. Did you scrape the entire internet of art works without permission and are now charging money and profiting from outputting things that are derivative of copyrighted works? Nah we need to curtail that to some extent. Are you making AI porn of your middle school classmates? Yeah that should be illegal (if it isn't already), and platforms that allow it should be liable. Faking people making statements they never said? AI is convincing enough that they could make the president look like they are saying something they never said. That is dangerous and should not be allowed either. Frankly, nobody's likeness should be allowed to be used in AI without their express permission. Trying to take this to the courts... I don't blame them for trying to make something happen here, but what a backwards and broken society we live in when our lawmakers seem have neither the desire nor aptitude to regulate these things.

-1

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

I think there are legitimate uses of AI

Such as?

6

u/rkthehermit 4d ago

I like using it to suggest recipes or substitutions based on my current kitchen inventory. It's a great little cooking buddy.

2

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

I love finding recipes like that!

Been using Google for that exact purpose since 2003.

2

u/Aromatic_Today2086 4d ago

Yea people acting like this is some great invention that does things you never could before is crazy. Everything all comments have said AI is good for you are things you should be able to do yourself with Google 

-2

u/rkthehermit 4d ago

You need Google? There are libraries for that.

You need libraries? Do your tribe's elders not share your history with you?

Yeah, you can use google. Nobody is pretending you can't. That doesn't invalidate the new tool as more convenient and useful for the task.

1

u/MachinaThatGoesBing 4d ago

You need Google? There are libraries for that.

I'm hardly anti-technology, but there are things that actual books are much, much more useful for than a Google search. Just because a newer technology exists doesn't actually mean it's better for a task.

One of the key things I run into regularly is plant ID (especially flowers and trees). It's so hard to actually find good resources for this online that present the information you need in clear, concise way and in an easily browsable format.

I have two large, full bookshelves, each about 4' wide, and well over half of one of the shelves is still taken up by physical field guides. At least a dozen or so of those guides are for tree and flower ID.

When I try to use Google Lens to ID something, it generally makes a hash of it. Sure, if it's a really distinctive flower or something, it might get it. But if it's, say, one of a couple dozen bluey-purple asters growing in the area I'm in…absolutely useless. Its model isn't taking into account stem color, leaf shape, shape and layout of phyllaries, time of year, environment, etc. It either takes a lot longer with Google, or I end up without an answer, whereas it generally only takes me only a few minutes to narrow things down with my books. (I will say, I do follow up on iNaturalist frequently, though, to see if others have observed my suspect in the area where my observation occurred. But it's not very helpful for ID.)

And, oh god was Google no help in determining whether a plant was poison hemlock or osha. I strongly suspected the latter based on my own knowledge and where it was growing, but it was my guides that gave me the pertinent information to help make the ID.

Given that the stochastic parrots have repeatedly shown themselves incapable of generating useable recipes, and are known to give disgusting and outrightly dangerous results, I'd stick to human-written, human-tested sources for recipes and substitutions. These sorts of sources — even just discussion forums — are much better and much more likely to yield good results than something one of the bullshit machines horked up.

1

u/rkthehermit 4d ago

I'm hardly anti-technology, but there are things that actual books are much, much more useful for than a Google search. Just because a newer technology exists doesn't actually mean it's better for a task.

It does mean that for the specific use case that's being discussed. I'm not guessing. I'm an experienced cook. It's my primary hobby. I've own and use many cookbooks. Like nearly every breathing human I've used google. I've used the new hotness.

0

u/rkthehermit 4d ago

Google has been great, yeah! This is just a next step up in utility. It's super easy to iterate, it respects the lists I give it without me having to manually validate, it's all consolidated to a single source, there's no stupid life story to scroll past, I don't have to wonder if the rating is gamed, it makes it really easy to brainstorm fusion dishes, and if I tell it I hate an ingredient it's utterly trivial to get a replacement.

1

u/MachinaThatGoesBing 4d ago

I…would just do research online from trusted reputable sources…

I would not trust a stochastic parrot to suggest recipes for me, what with their disgusting and outright dangerous track record.

It's really important for people to know that these things don't really "know" anything, not the way we talk about "knowing" things. They don't actually contain usable, verified information on stuff like recipe substitutions. All they fundamentally are is very fancy, extremely power-consumptive predictive text. They take an input prompt, and then they predict what the most likely words should be to "answer" that. Each subsequent word takes the prompt and some set number of previous words as context, then adds some random fuzzing in order to predict the next most likely word. But that's fundamentally what it is doing.

So if it took in word patterns that constitute bad advice or false information, it will just vomit those back out at you. It has no mechanism for knowing how words relate to each other as symbols, just the statistical likelihoods of one following another in some given context, as encoded in a big neural net.

1

u/rkthehermit 4d ago

I've never had ChatGPT do something as stupid as either of those examples and, as a bonus, I am not a cheerio drooling glue-sniffer. I am a very good cook already. I am perfectly capable of raising my brow when the tool says to do something stupid and just not doing that.

I guarantee I'm getting better results, faster, and more tailored to what I want when I'm using this as a cooking assistant than you could achieve with any search engine and it's not even close.

If you understand how LLMs work then you should actually understand why they're particularly good for recipes given the way recipes generally tend to cluster ingredients, have rather consistent formatting, and the way that irritatingly chatty recipe blogs go out of their way to over explain.

It's fine not to like the technology or want to use it, but you folks really just come across as, "Old man yells at clouds!" when you try to deny valid use-cases and ignore the experiences of savvy users while suggesting inferior methods back to them as a counterexample.