Disney, Universal sue image creator Midjourney for copyright infringement

This right here.

I hate Disney and their unhinged copyright policies but I hate generative AI just a bit more, so I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

The problem is that Disney isnt fighting to stop AI but to gain control of it. They just want a fat piece of the pie and to stem the competition to their own animation and movie sector. They mostly want to kill the indie animation scene that could come about with Gen AI, they will still use it aggressively to bring up their own profits.
It's corporate AI vs open source AI.
- the indie animation scene that could come about with Gen AI
  You're going to have to unpack that because I have no idea what you're talking about.
- I mean, to be fair genAI is just plagiarism with extra steps so it's no different from them issuing takedowns for shitty mobile games ripping off Frozen characters. Indie studios are actively harmed by GenAI as well, given that if their content gets fed into MidJourney they don't have the resources to battle in court. So I think if GenAI faces more scrutiny as a whole and laws are put in place to stop people profiting off material generated on copyrighted material, the only people harmed are those pumping out AI slop to make a quick buck - which I'm happy with
  Like to be clear I don't like Disney and I have a lot of grievances with copyright laws at large. But a broken clock's right twice a day and I think they're based for doing this
I guess the enemy of my enemy is my friend?
NEVER make this mistake.
The enemy of your enemy is your enemy's enemy and nothing more unless you have other commonalities with them.

I look forward to no longer having to explain that any art I am using is artisanally hand-crafted using traditional methods by actual humans who have been compensated for their work, because that is such an absurd thing to have to claim, but we live in such a stupid world that it unfortunately has to be said now.

I am paralyzed. I don't know who to cheer for because, fuck all of them.

(Universal mainly because of JK Rowling)

Not a fan of big corpos, but Midjourney is so fucked 😬

Hell yes.

Oof, this will immediately chill the market for image models. Disney has a good case here and all the resources in the world to fight it to the bitter end. If they set a legal precedent it might be game over for pretty much all of LLM. Welp, it was fun while it lasted.

If they set a legal precedent it might be game over for pretty much all of LLM.
Now you're just teasing!

Great thread from Ed Zitron with some thoughts on this, and extracts from the suit

This was predictable, no?

The funny thing is that the training data for these big models is pooled, so the data pillaged from random artists is combined with the data from copyrights movies, shows, and others. This means that these copyright capital corporations can't target just their own stuff in the models (it would be technically very difficult).

The models need to be scrapped and the training data needs to be purged (they will probably use the pillaged data from the artists who can't afford a legion of lawyers). This will lead to a loss of model "performance", so that will be interesting.