On Wednesday, June 11, Disney and several other major animation studios filed a landmark lawsuit against the AI company Midjourney for allegedly profiting from, distributing, and using copyrighted models.

While the multimedia giant Disney has been around for over 100 years, Midjourney and companies like it are relatively new, with Midjourney first released to the public in 2022. It is a diffusion-based generative AI model, meaning it uses neural networks trained on massive datasets of image–text pairs. By observing the patterns between visual elements like shapes and colors and their associated text, the model can reverse-engineer images from inputted prompts. Midjourney is also closed-source, meaning the company has not publicly disclosed its code or what datasets were used to train its model.

Disney’s 110-page lawsuit alleges that Midjourney infringes on its copyrights by using Disney-owned images to train its model and enabling users to generate images that infringe on Disney’s intellectual property. For example, putting a prompt like “sci-fi villain with red light blade” into Midjourney could generate an image of or closely resembling the popular Disney character Darth Vader. 

It’s also important to note that Midjourney already uses filters for content such as pornography and hate speech—so it is technically possible to filter out specific content categories. Studios like Adobe Firefly, for example, already use licensed datasets and watermark detection to avoid copyrighted material. 

OpenAI, the creator of the popular ChatGPT, also prohibits the generation of Disney characters, scenes, and overall art style. In conjunction with Midjourney being closed-source, Disney implies that the AI company’s behavior reflects an intentional avoidance of precautions in order to monetize infringed intellectual property.

The Precedent

While this is the first time a Hollywood studio has filed suit over AI-generated images, it is only the latest in a growing effort to crack down on AI plagiarism of visual art. 

In 2023, Getty Images filed a claim against Stability AI for using watermarked photos in model training. Similar to Disney’s claims about Midjourney, Getty alleged that Stability’s use was intentional and deceptive. However, Getty has not yet claimed that the individual outputs constitute direct infringement of any specific protected image—only that the training data used was unfairly web-scraped. Stability was also the target of a separate class-action lawsuit in 2023 by several visual artists, who alleged that the company used their works without consent as training data, resulting in the model mimicking their unique styles. That suit also focused on the training data, not the AI’s output, and the claims were largely dismissed.

The key difference between those cases and Disney’s is that Disney expands upon an unpromising precedent by alleging that the outputted image itself is also an infringement, not just the training data. In other words, Disney’s claim broadens the legal battlefield: it asserts that the generated result is a copyright violation, even if it was never explicitly named or directly copied, as long as the strong resemblance is there. 

The Implications

Concerns surrounding the ethics of generative AI have been steadily growing, and through this lawsuit, Disney positions itself as a kind of safeguard—suggesting that it is protecting artists from being undermined or replaced by machines. However, Disney itself has long faced criticism for its treatment of the very artists it claims to defend. Reports of long hours and intense work environments are common. According to public salary data, Disney animators earn up to 22% less than the industry average, even though their wages exceed union baseline pay.

Disney claims that Midjourney is hurting the same artists that Disney allegedly mistreats and underpays, which begs the question—who will actually stand up for the artists whose works are being used instead of just protecting profit?