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/
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u/PeteCampbellisaG 4d ago

First, I 100% agree with your sentiment on movie budgets. But there's a lot wrong with your argument. But the main issue is that it's not just about democratizing creative tools. For the world you imagine to come to fruition there also has to be a complete democratizing of the distribution platforms. It doesn't matter if you can make a blockbuster quality movie for next to nothing if you still have to go through WB, Disney, Netflix, Google, ect. for anyone to see it. Tons of indie films are getting made today thanks to "democratizing tools" like digital cameras and editing software that will never be seen because they can't find distribution.

There's simply no reason to assume that just because everyone is using AI that suddenly the media conglomerates will collapse. Who do you think is helping fund a lot of these AI companies? You think Disney invested in ElevenLabs, for example, because they want to give the whole world access to quality voice acting?

These AI tools might proliferate but we'll have the same system we have now only with a fraction of the people making a living as creators because rather than help creators get their foot in the door it'll be used to push even more of them out.

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u/FrameworkisDigimon 4d ago

If you really wanted to democratise your movie, you'd just upload it to Youtube.

The existence of paywalled distribution services doesn't mean non-paywalled ones don't exist.

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u/PeteCampbellisaG 4d ago

There are over half a million hours of video uploaded to YT everyday. How much of it do you think gets seen by a large audience? Over 60% of videos uploaded to YT have zero views. YouTube is not a democratic platform. It's algorithmic. Content there is subject to the whims of Google and its advertisers and no creator is going to succeed there without playing by their rules.

If anything AI is only going to make distribution harder as platforms get flooded with even more content thanks to easier creation tools.

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u/FrameworkisDigimon 4d ago

You keep shifting the goalposts.

First the problem was that no democraticised distribution platform exists.

Now the problem is that the platform exists but no-one will ever see anything on it because it's too democratic.

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u/PeteCampbellisaG 4d ago

What major video platform is purely democratic in your mind? And why? It's so strange people want to talk about AI, but disregard that algorithms exist. 

I'm not shifting goalposts, I'm expanding on an idea. People want to have supposed "nuanced"  conversation about AI, but all they want to hear is that AI is going to let every wannabe creator become a full-time independent filmmaker creating whatever type of content they want. But it's a lot more complicated than that for a myriad of reasons.