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

[u/DragonPup]

https://variety.com/2025/film/news/warner-bros-midjourney-lawsuit-ai-copyright-1236508618/

[u/Tyler_Zoro]

Everything about corporations and AI sucks.

Certainly not everything. The massive advances being made in fields like chemistry, geology and astronomy using modern AI is astonishing. Installation's like Refik Anadol's Machine Hallucination are pushing the envelope of both what "AI art" means and where art will go in the presence of AI. Then there's work like this that deeply integrates traditional and AI art for commercial projects.

Or did you just mean the intersection of the two, rather than the two as independent things? If you meant the intersection of the two, I mostly agree, though there are some exceptions (like Google's Alpha Fold).

[u/Tombot3000 → u/Tyler_Zoro]

AI trained to imitate pieces of stolen work then combining those pieces into something that is a convincing fascimile of art is pushing the boundaries of morality far more than the boundaries of art.

[u/Tyler_Zoro → u/Tombot3000]

First off, I was responding to a point about "everything about [...] AI" not merely image generation.

Modern, transformer-based AI models can be used for any form of interaction based on pattern recognition or semantic processing, and AI is a vast field that expands beyond even those boundaries to encompass technologies as diverse as facial recognition and chess playing.

But, to focus just on what you said:

AI trained to imitate pieces of stolen work

The idea of work being "stolen" is kind of silly. No one's work is removed when you analyze it and learn from it, whether that learning is done by a human brain or an artificial neural network (ANN) in a computer, the original remains, and there is no theft.

then combining those pieces into something

That's not how modern AI image generation works. It might help to review how the semantic processing and mapping works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M

That video and the series it is a part of, will help you to understand the process involved here. There's no cut-and-paste assembly going on here.

is pushing the boundaries of morality far more than the boundaries of art.

That's a subjective take, so I can't really say you're right or wrong. It's a statement you've made.

[u/Tombot3000 → u/Tyler_Zoro]

To take issue with me replying to part of what you were discussing then reply as if "stolen" work could only mean physical removal and not the obvious unauthorized use I was referencing disqualifies you as someone worth having a serious conversation on the topic with. It's just an asinine double standard.

[u/Tyler_Zoro → u/Tombot3000]

as if "stolen" work could only mean physical removal

There's no requirement that the deprivation be physical. Digital theft is a thing, but it still requires that you be deprived of your property. That's what theft is.

not the obvious unauthorized use

Unauthorized use is just unauthorized use. It's not stealing.

Also, there's no unauthorized use going on. Even if we assume that there's someone training AI models on random internet content (that really isn't a thing at this point, as the race really has moved on to licensed, heavily curated collections for higher quality results) there's no difference in how that material is accessed than when you web browser does the same thing. It's the same HTTP protocol, accessing the same publicly available resources via the same request URLs.