Ray Seilie recently spoke to IndieWire about Disney and NBCUniversal’s lawsuit against AI firm Midjourney, which has the potential to affect the entertainment industry at large as a first-of-its-kind lawsuit by setting a precedent for how AI firms can train their models.
Ray notes that a complete agreement between major studios and creatives is a rare find in the entertainment industry, making this case all the more consequential for artists.
“It’s going to be an important case that’ll affect the rights held by almost all creatives, regardless of how large they are,” Ray tells IndieWire. “It’s a rare alliance in the legal industry, or the entertainment legal industry, where you see studios actually doing something that artists are 100 percent behind.”
Ray adds that he believes Disney and NBCUniversal have a strong case to position Midjourney as intentionally committing copyright infringement, given the specificity of their lawsuit and their unanswered pleas for the AI firm to restrict certain material.
“Just candidly, I think it is hard to see how the courts will let Midjourney keep doing what it’s doing without any kind of restriction,” he explains. “To me, I think the studios have a very strong case here.”
Ray continues that although Midjourney may argue that its users themselves are committing copyright infringement, Disney and NBCUniversal will likely try to uncover how Midjourney’s models were trained in order to not prevent generation of copyrighted works.
“The studios want the precedent here. They want a district court opinion that says that scraping data for a training engine or using copyrighted material in training data is a copyright violation. I think they’re gonna want a ruling that says that, and it’ll probably go through appeals,” he concludes.
