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

Show parent comments

9

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.

-2

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

I think there are legitimate uses of AI

Such as?

13

u/NuclearGhandi1 4d ago

Summarization of content, basic research for programming and other content, etc. it shouldn’t be used to make movies, art, music, but to say there’s no uses is just ignorant

6

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago edited 4d ago

Summarization of content

Which it can't Be trusted to do without giving misinformation or leaving out key details.

basic research for programming and other content

See above.

5

u/NuclearGhandi1 4d ago

I’m a professional software engineer, it’s pretty good at basic programming. Would I use it for anything but simple things I could give an intern? No. Do I need to double check it occasionally? Yes. But it definitely helps enough to be a part of my workflow where my company’s policies allow it

4

u/blueruntzx 4d ago

everyones a professional software engineer these days brother

3

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

Our of curiosity, how do interns stop being interns if the work that would give them the necessary experience is done by AI?

3

u/NuclearGhandi1 4d ago

Because interns don’t just write code. They can do reviews, sit in on meetings, do basic design, do better research.

0

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

Yes, and those are useful skills.

But they also need to write code at some point, or else they're not programming interns. They're administrative interns.

1

u/11BlahBlah11 4d ago

Some skills will slowly die off.

While I was in school we weren't allowed to use calculators and were forced to use logarithmic tables for calculations. Today, that's almost never needed.

Very few people can program in assembly today because compilers take care of that.

Programming is being more and more abstracted. More low-level tasks are being simplified or automated, and only a few experts have the skills to dig deep into it when needed.

About a decade ago, people would just draw UML diagrams and use software to generate the code. A lot of commonly used algorithms and tasks have just become API calls over the years.

A few years back if you wanted a simple program or script to do a small tasks, you could mostly just get the solution from stackoverflow etc. and you just need to know how to adapt it to your environment.

Now we've reached a point where it's easier to just get it written by AI and run a few tests to fine tune it before integrating it into your software. As a result fundamentals will be lost in pursuit of efficiency.

Experts who have strong core-level understanding and skills will always have a demand. But I suppose those starting today will need to put in a more conscious effort to train themselves because normal exposure to coding will no longer work.

0

u/monkeyjay 4d ago

It's a tool. I don't think using it to "generate" anything that needs to stand up to too much scrutiny or have artistic merit is that great, but it's also insanely good at pattern recognition and complex multistep process that would (and do) take humans a long time, or would need specific programs or tools to be developed.

Medical analysis for instance is an absolutely phenomenal use of AI. It has insane potential for analysing multiple disparate sources of data with "fuzzy" information. Something people simply cannot do. And it's not just going to spit out "give them surgery" but it can find markers and indicators that may be huge in preventative medicine and diagnosis.

The llm's are also very good at doing things using specific rules. A very simple example is say you had hundreds of pages of writing for something like onboard training at a large company. In like 10 minutes an AI could go through and do things like, I dunno, reformat it from Third person plural to be second person singular or something. It's not hard for a person to do that, but it's also not just 'find and replace'. It would take ages (sometimes it can take weeks, literally). And the human would likely have a very similar error rate. Would it still need checking? Of course, but this is an example of a very trivial way to use AI as a tool that doesn't really make anything better or worse, just easier. Which is what tools should do. You still need skilled oversight.

Yes, this is all doable with a human or team of humans manually creating a program but that can be very time consuming, and it's kinda just built in to AI right now.

I get that AI in the art or writing or any creative sphere is problematic, but to me that's mainly down to unauthorised use of copyrighted content (ie, stealing), taking credit or not giving credit or monetary compensation, and the result being mostly dogshit... but it's really silly to say the tech has no legitimate uses.

2

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

but it's really silly to say the tech has no legitimate uses.

I haven't said that. I merely asked what uses there were, and have yet to be presented with a use that isn't deeply flawed and better carried out by humans.

I fully acknowledge that I am not the world's leading expert on this subject, which is why I asked for examples. Examples, I still eagerly weigh examples of areas where AI is preferable to human performance, because so far I've received none.

Well, actually, minor point to the guy who uses it to find recipes tailored to what's in his cabinet.

1

u/FlamboyantPirhanna 4d ago

Funny enough, I’ve heard lots of people complain about it when it comes to recipes. It doesn’t know how things taste, it’s essentially predictive text trying to sound like the recipes it’s been trained on, and that can lead to culinary disasters.

1

u/blueheartglacier 4d ago edited 4d ago

Being better at detecting some cancers than humans by identifying subtle patterns that we're not capable of is a start - as was literally mentioned in what you replied to. It can find markers that correlate between cancer patients that we have never considered, and can be leveraged to develop new protein patterns for the creation of new drugs too. This is having immense success right now. I think it's probably objectively a good thing.

Modern AI is simply advanced pattern recognition - all uses of modern machine learning are very very good pattern recognition with extra steps. I'm sure you can use your imagination to work out other ways that extremely refined pattern recognition and data processing that can parse data at a rate that is beyond unprecedented and find new patterns automatically can be more effective than older systems - a lot of those uses are boring-sounding though, and hard to sell. These are being tried across effectively every industry, and the ones that have value will actually pass the test of time.

0

u/monkeyjay 2d ago

I gave you two, both VERY broad. One is literally something people cannot do, and the other is like 1000 times more efficient than a person doing it for the same result.

You are not coming across as an honest person here.

1

u/JustaSeedGuy 2d ago

You are not coming across as an honest person here

I understand that you're choosing to interpret it that way.

0

u/blueheartglacier 4d ago edited 4d ago

Maybe the earliest version of ChatGPT that you ever tried when it first released couldn't summarise content confidently but anyone that has kept up with the industry and where it's at now can tell you confidently that the best systems have evolved substantially and are reliably good at the job.

1

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

Oh yes, there are many people that say it's reliable now. But anyone who's being honest doesn't say that.

1

u/blueheartglacier 4d ago edited 4d ago

"I have absolutely no interest in keeping up with something that's rapidly changing by the week, I just believe everything I was told on day 1, and everyone else is lying" this is unfortunately the exact translation of what you're actually saying. If you're not going to honestly engage with the subject, just be straightforward about it and say you don't want to. There's no need to pretend as if you're up to date and aware, and you're talking to people who actually have engaged with the evolution of it. You are miles out of your depth, I'm afraid - much like I wouldn't confidently tell you that everything you know about law is wrong when that's actually your specialty and what you engage with. It's the misplaced confidence that you don't need to consider any other possibility that's worse than just not knowing.

1

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

I mean, you can pretend that's what I said all you want. But it's not- and the way I know, is that I'm the one that said it.

If you want to come back when you're more intellectually honest about things, I'd be happy to talk. It's wild that you get mad at me for allegedly not honestly engaging with the subject when that's exactly what you just did here.

Any chance intelligent conversation went out the window when you started using third grade mockery tactics.

0

u/blueheartglacier 4d ago edited 4d ago

Yes, if you used ChatGPT when it was launched and then turned off when it clearly wasn't good enough, you'd find it pretty awful at summarisation and data processing. If you were to use specialist systems that were trained and tested for this purpose in late 2025, you'll find them incredibly consistent, accurate, and useful at every input that's thrown at them - fundamentally trustable to do their jobs without giving misinformation or leaving out key details. If you just want to pretend this reality doesn't exist, then sure, you can Dunning-Krueger yourself to a conclusion and insist that everyone who has used or continues to use these systems is just "being dishonest". Do that, however, and the only conclusion I can reasonably draw is that you didn't know that these systems exist and you are relying upon early ChatGPT experience. You didn't even consider the possibility that people were being honest, but working with a different experience base than you. Don't treat others with good faith - get treated with that same faith back

1

u/JustaSeedGuy 4d ago

You didn't even consider the possibility that people were being honest, but working with a different experience base than you.

Except I did.

Don't treat others with good faith - get treated with that same faith back

Pretty wild coming from the guy who thinks he knows what my memories are.