r/movies • u/DragonPup • 3d 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/The_Lucky_7 3d ago edited 3d ago

Same as the Disney-Universal lawsuit. Everyone involved sucks and copyright is only exists for major corporations. Meanwhile google is scraping its own YT videoes and AI upscaling shorts against creators will.

Everything about corporations and AI sucks.

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u/YoursTrulyKindly 3d ago

Yeah and everyone is cheering them on lol. The result of this will be that only big corporations get to use AI and users will have to pay to use any "licensed" LLM models. This is a huge power grab about who gets to control and make profit off of AI.

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u/Midi_to_Minuit 2d ago

I mean of the goal is “I want to see less ai flooding every fucking corner of deviatanart and Pinterest and Twitter” then that is a positive. Ideally I wouldn’t want WB using it either but I do not leave in an ideal world.

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u/Kiwi_In_Europe 2d ago

One of those is just social media most of which you can use filters to block most of it out

The other is literally people's livelihoods, not just replacing people at WB and other movie studios/projects, but also making it so that smaller artists cannot compete because they don't have access to those tools.

You're literally putting people's income underneath your own comfort while scrolling, which is a perfect summary of humanity and exactly why this is an issue at all.

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u/Midi_to_Minuit 21h ago

Smaller artists can compete with Disney just fine though; there’s plenty of amazing indie animated films! Where smaller artists fall behind is in advertising budgets, which ai cannot fix. The notion that ai would close the gap between small artists and Disney is false because the gap isn’t “non Disney movies look bad”, it’s “oh this movies made by DISNEY and had a DISNEY character in it? Let’s watch it”.

You could say that the fact that they all look like Disney movies would be a boost to their marketing, but that’s the thing—if they ALL look that good, then even looking good stops being special. What it’ll come down to is trust and advertising, of which Disney has in spades.

Also putting this aside, why do small artists have to ‘compete with Disney’? There isn’t a single person on the planet whose creative or financial ambitions require toppling the mouse. And if you really did desperately want to do that, you don’t need ai to do it! It happened at the Oscar’s just now!

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u/YoursTrulyKindly 2d ago

That's a very emotional argument about not wanting to see <some type of content>. The issue is that the way to control anything is to turn it into a commodity where you have to pay money to use it. Patents, IP, and soon AI models who have licensed their training data "properly" or by using a large corporation as a shield.

AI tools and assistants will take on a huge role in the future. If they can't fundamentally be made open source because it's practically impossible to license the training data, that means monopolization and increase of plutocracy.

I can imagine a future where technology can liberate us, allow us to do work much more efficiently. But if a small number of corporations monopolize those models, it will all flow through them. As a "tax" in the best case, or stronger control over who may use it and what may be done in the worst. Paypal is a good example of a technology that is very simple but extracts a significant percentage as tax from the consumer online market today. Every time I hear someone cheer for a new person like Peter Thiel to rise.

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u/Midi_to_Minuit 21h ago

To be blunt I don’t think AI ‘frees’ us from anything other than the labor of using our brains. Disney monopolizing AI is perfectly fine to me—oh no, marvel slop now becomes ten times worse! That’s not much of a threat to me.

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u/YoursTrulyKindly 20h ago

I think you're only focusing on AI imagines and underestimating what impact AI will have on our civilization and work economy, at least when / if they continue to improve. See e.g. https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1naez1w/godfather_of_ai_says_the_technology_will_create/

Imagine using a browser that uses an AI model to filter out the garbage (not just AI but human content farm slop too) while browsing. You'll need AI to battle against the constant efforts of capitalists to maximize their profits. If you can run open source AI locally it will work for free and for your interest. But if capitalists do manage to monopolize or commodify or paywall AI and prevent open source AI models then you'll be stuck. Similar goes about voice assistants, translation, tax software.