I dunno were I stand on this one. I can see Disneys argument and agree with it on first glance, but at the same time, is the artists doing fan art infringing copyright then?

Artists doing fan art are infringing copyright, yes. If the fan art meets the fair use criteria then they are not Infringing.

Companies usually overlook the infringement from fan artists because it's free advertising and the public backlash is not worth going after lone artists. They usually will go after fan art of people that profit off it.

requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

good luck proving and putting an accurate number to that perceived 'damage'?

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn't go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

A copy is not theft.

Intellectual property is thought monopoly. See Disco Elysium for a particularly sad case of it.

Yes I under that, but is Midjourney profiting off these characters? Ie are people paying for these services just so they can create images of these specific characters ? I think that’s the question that needs to be answered here.

I mean you’re not paying piecemeal as you would for an artist to create your commission of Shrek getting railed by Donkey, you pay for the service which in turns creates anything you tell it to.

It’s like I’m still not convinced that training AI with copyrighted material is infringement, because in my mind is not any different than me seeing Arthas when I was kid, thinking he was cool as fuck and then deciding to make my own OC inspired by him. Was I infringing on Blizzard’s copyrighted character for taking inspiration from its design? Was Mike Pondsmith infringing on William Gibson’s copyright when he invented Cyberpunk?

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

I mean if you paid for a copy of wc3 to find out about Arthas then no, if you downloaded the game illegally then yes. These companies are often torrenting content just like we would just instead of consuming it directly they’re feeding it to their slop printers to train them. I’m all for piracy, including in this context, but if copyright is a going to be a thing and going to be enforced against individuals pirating treats to consume then it sure as shit should be enforced against the corporations pirating huge amounts of content to train their energy sucking crap factories lol

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

Piracy to me is not the same thing, I’m actually not in favor of piracy, because the way I see it if you want access to a content, and the creator says that you need to pay for that content then you will pay for it. If not then you don’t really want access to it, or you in fact simply did not want to pay for it in which case it’s very similar to stealing. None of the pro piracy arguments convince me, except the ones in which it’s about consuming the content in the format that you want. Ie I buy books from Amazon, but only because I want the writer to get their cut, but I will either remove the DRM off the book or pirate it. So yes if the AI was trained using for example a book whose content is not freely available and ChatGPT simply pirates the content of the book to train their models, then they are in the wrong.

But here’s the thing about my argument regarding AI training data. I never played Warcraft3 nor World of Warcraft! I only saw the cool art that was displayed on GameStop, online and on shirts on hot topic. I never paid Blizzard for access to Arthas, the design of Arthas was publicly accessible to me by virtue of Blizzard trying to promote their game. So I guess what I’m saying is if the content they trained a model is publicly accessible to people without payment, then there’s no reason AI cannot be trained on it.

As far as the ethics of piracy, my stance is that
The current model where we are essentially paying for someone to hit copy and paste is inherently broken and we need to move to a model based on commissions/grants etc where the artists are being paid to make the works, ideally through public funds.

As far as the current reality around the AI companies, that Arthas stand was one gamestop had a license to display in their store provided by Blizzard to promote their game. The copyrighted material you “trained on” was provided for piblic access. These companies aren’t training off of publicly available information, as I was saying, they’re torrenting the full copyrighted material in the exact same way a traditional pirate would, The only difference is what they’re doing with it afterwards.

Edit: I don’t know if there’s evidence of Midjourney’s developers doing it specifically but Meta absolutely has so it’s a pretty safe assumption.

Terrible idea man. Can you imagine Trump being in charge of funding all of the arts? I don’t want any government with that sort of power over creative endeavor.

The current system works. You’re not paying for someone to hit copy paste, you’re paying for access to the idea that is physically embodied in the content if that makes sense. The creator decides whether you pay for that or not, and how much to pay. But many pirates don’t want to pay, don’t want to watch ad; in summary they simply believe that they are entitled to the work of the creative, which to me is absurd and outrageous.

But yeah that’s what I meant about AI training. If there are Shrek images out there that Disney willingly published and I trained an AI on it there should be no issue because it would be no different than me looking at Shrek and then making a drawing of it.

Yes but looking at publicly available shrek images is not what’s happening here, this is downloading every shrek movie

Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

• Disney and NBCUniversal have teamed up to sue Midjourney.
• The companies allege that the platform used its copyright protected material to train its model and that users can generate content that infringes on Disney and Universal’s copyrighted material.
• The scathing lawsuit requests that Midjourney be made to pay up for the damage it has caused the two companies.

Drama. A business partner of the creators used an illegal loophole to obtain a majority stake of the company and then fired the actual creators because they where considered to volatile.

The universe of Disco Elysium is Kurvitz paracosm which he has been creating since his teens. Its a part of their identity that they are now barred from expressing.

Its a bit like if you told Tolkien halfway trough writing lotr that he is fired as the author and can never write anything about middle earth again.

Would it not then be better to buy a shady key to financially hurt the company?

You should totally play the game, but make sure that you pirate it so your money doesn't go to the thief who stole the rights from the creators.