Is AI Art Piracy? Your Favorite Media Giants Say Yes
It's pretty clear that, when someone owns a copyright, they want to prevent their works from being copied. This includes any derivative works that aren't being made for a fair use purpose. Yet, how does this look when we add generative AI to the mix? Our laws don't have an answer for us yet. Nonetheless, courts have, and are in the middle of, responding to this controversy. The Times has reported that media conglomerates Disney and Universal Studios have filed a joint lawsuit against Midjourney, an AI image generation tool. Founded in 2021, the platform raked in $100 million in revenue last year through its subscription model. It relies on a massive dataset of media that isn't available for public scrutiny, making it questionable whether any data was sourced with the approval of the original copyright holders. It's this fear that has led many independent artists to "poison" their images with the hopes of tricking these generation tools into producing inc...