In a lawsuit initiated on Wednesday in a federal court in Los Angeles, Disney and Comcast’s Universal are collaborating to contest Midjourney, a generative AI image platform, accusing it of extensive copyright violation.

The lawsuit straightforwardly labels Midjourney as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

The complaint asserts that Midjourney illegally accessed the studios’ libraries, utilizing their content to teach its AI to produce eerily accurate replicas of beloved characters like Star Wars’ Darth Vader and Frozen’s Elsa, without any licensing agreements or authorization. NBCUniversal’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel, Kim Harris, informed Reuters that the case is centered around safeguarding “the hard work of all the artists whose work entertains and inspires us and the significant investment we make in our content.”

By capitalizing on Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works and distributing images (and soon videos) that overtly incorporate and replicate Disney’s and Universal’s renowned characters—without any financial input in their creation—Midjourney exemplifies the classic copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,” the suit contends, according to a copy acquired by Deadline. “Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is produced using AI or another method does not lessen its infringing nature. Midjourney’s actions misappropriate Disney’s and Universal’s intellectual property and jeopardize the foundational incentives of U.S. copyright law that fuel American leadership in movies, television, and other creative endeavors.”

Mashable recently evaluated leading AI image generators, finding that Midjourney easily generated deepfake images featuring a recognizable Disney character. In fact, every AI image generator tested created a similar deepfake with minimal resistance.

Midjourney’s legal defense is not off to an encouraging start. The suit refers to a 2022 Forbes interview in which Midjourney founder David Holz acknowledged that the company does not make an effort to obtain consent from living artists or those whose work is still under copyright. The statement, now included in the court documentation, could trouble the AI firm.

“There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from,” the founder stated to Forbes. “It would be beneficial if images had metadata embedded in them regarding the copyright owner or something. But that’s not the reality; there’s no registry.”

This isn’t Midjourney’s first encounter with legal issues. A year ago, a federal judge in California determined that a group of 10 artists suing Midjourney, Stability AI, and others had convincingly argued that their copyrighted work was scraped, stored, and possibly monetized without consent. That lawsuit continues, as do similar legal actions against OpenAI and Meta. While Disney and Universal are among the first studios in Hollywood to confront the AI industry, the New York Times, alongside an increasing number of news organizations, has filed a lawsuit against OpenAI.

At present, the question of copyright law in relation to AI training remains in a legal grey area, indicating that the Disney and Universal lawsuit may have significant ramifications for the broader generative AI sector.

Established in 2021, Midjourney generates income through paid subscriptions and reportedly earned $300 million last year.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent entity, lodged a lawsuit against OpenAI in April, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.