“I am your father,” says Darth Vader in the most famous scene in the history of cinema. “No, you are not my father,” replies a young Luke, who this time is not Luke and on the other hand, Darth Vader is not even Darth Vader, they are both fake versions generated with the AI, with the wrong background, the pixels a little crackled on the edge of the helf, and an even more confused copyright of the relative.
Here, we have already arrived here. Disney and Universal have decided that it is time to stop pretending nothing and have brought Midjourney to court, because one thing is to play, another is to build a hundreds of millions by copying iconic characters with a click.
So sooner or later we had to get there and we got bad, and it will only be the first of many others, because it was obvious that at a certain moment someone would have raised his hand to say that copyright is not an option even in the era of the images generated on command, with a prompt. This time to do it are Disney and Universal, who have decided to bring Midjourney to court, the best known artificial intelligence startup that generates images from text descriptions and now become, as the major lawyers say, a violated copyright well wole.
A little history: Midjourney, founded in 2022, was a small community of smanettoni (now, with the times that run, and run very fast, you have to use the remote past also for something created the day before yesterday), today it is a machine of 300 million dollars a year, sells subscriptions, allows anyone to generate images of all kinds and for months they have been in the sight of the large production houses, which have now decided to pass to the Facts: one hundred and ten pages of accusations, images produced by AI who replicate characters such as Darth Vader, Elsa, Hulk, Yoda, Spiderman, the Minions, and all with a model trained on images taken everywhere, without authorization.
“Midjourney is the parasite of the copyright par excellence”, write Disney and Universal, accusing the startup of having copied entire protected works to train their models, without authorization, without compensation, often simply by changing the background or location, leaving the rest identical, and it is here that the point comes for me that it is the real node of the matter.
Because, unlike everything that came before, of the CGI or the motion capture or of the many other technologies to create worlds and characters, the generative artificial intelligence does not build, copy, and can only copy, since its mechanism itself consists in absorbing pre -existing images and then rejecting them in a new form. In short, if it serves to create a minion or Darth Vader (or something similar, changing here and there), it will be so faithful that it is indistinguishable from the original, and this is precisely what frightens in Hollywood and is understandable.
There is another question that must be said, and that I have seen in very few lift, because today it seems that to be modern, enlightened, progressive, enthusiastic, inclusive, non -passatists, one must always be in favor of AI, at any cost. Except when you take the artistic work away or copy you the characters on which you built your empire. Except that copyright is not an optional, it is a fundamental right, it is copyright, what guarantees that those who create something can be recognized and remunerated. Another little story: I remember it well, when those who attacked the copyright were the extremists of the copyleft, the no logo, the more or less radical heirs of Naomi Klein, those who wanted to abolish every intellectual property in the name of free culture. They were left -wing extremists (even on the right, however anticapitalists), and then the generative came, who realized that dream in a radical and automatic way, and suddenly the same that twenty years ago defended the copyright, in the name of modernity, became the enthusiasts of the AI who violates it every day.
And for me, let’s be understood, it is not a question of being in favor or against AI: technology goes on and we would miss it. The problem is that today those who defend the copyright defends the idea that creating something, drawing it, planning it, writing it, turning it, still requires a recognition, not only moral, concrete, economic. This is why the cause against Midjourney is exemplary: for the first time a great major does not just say that the AI is dangerous but puts black on white that these models, which absorb hundreds of millions of protected images without paying anyone, are unacceptable, legally unacceptable.
That the legal battle will be complicated is clear: Fair Use issues in the United States are a mined field, each case makes a school, the outcome is not at all obvious, but the central question is simple for me: the generative works because it is a copy, and this is what you can no longer pretend not to see. Do you remember the cause that Al Bano won against Michael Jackson? Because Michael Jackson would have copied I don’t remember the name anymore, what the hell was called, the cores of the cod, by Al Bano? I really don’t think Michael Jackson had done so consciously, nor that a world pop star like him needed Cigni and Al Bano’s cod, but he was condemned. While the doubt remains on Michael, there would be very few on the AI.
Of course, even Hollywood has used AI always and is using it: to rejuvenate Harrison Ford, to build whole scenes without redoing them from scratch, to alter voices in the movies (and precisely on the items there is already a real problem, with the AI are copying voices of voice actors, there has also been a strike about it, so the theme is not theoretical at all) but the point is not to use or not to use the point, the point is the point. Another substantial difference between using AI to improve a content of which you have rights, and train a whole model on content that do not belong to you and that you have not even asked to use.
The real problem is not technical, it is cultural, because it has been used to it, for years, to an internet where everything is free, where everything is copying without mentioning anyone, without paying anyone, where those who dare to speak of copyright is branded as a reactionary or an enemy of freedom, and now the next step is that even the author’s law should be free by principle, because “artificial intelligence does nothing but learn”, they explain that they are pitying. Nobody. The real risk is that we get used to an artistic far west where everything is free, not only the images, not only the music, but even the work of the authors, who at that point will become free forever, and there will no longer be a legal battle, it will be a cultural leap without return.
By the way, I went to look for the song that Michael Jackson would have copied from Al Bano: the real title is Balaka’s swans, from which Michael would have produced We You Be There (wonderful). The cod had nothing to do with it, that disappointment.