Disney Just Threw a Punch in a Major AI Fight
Uncanny Valley | WIRED
WIRED
4.1 • 572 Ratings
🗓️ 26 June 2025
⏱️ 42 minutes
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Summary
Disney and Universal recently filed suit against Midjourney, an AI image generation startup, alleging the company has become a “bottomless pit of plagiarism,” and that it freely reproduces the studio's copyrighted content, including their most iconic characters. The lawsuit has the potential to shape how intellectual property is treated in the AI era. So, we'll dive into the details of the case and others, and explain how this conflict gives us a window into the growing tensions between AI companies, publishers, and creators.
Articles mentioned in this episode:
- ‘Wall-E With a Gun’: Midjourney Generates Videos of Disney Characters Amid Massive Copyright Lawsuit
- Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement
You can follow our hosts on Bluesky—Michael Calore is @snackfight, Lauren Goode is @laurengoode, and Katie Drummond is @katie-drummond.
Join WIRED’s best and brightest on Uncanny Valley as they dissect the collision of tech, politics, finance, and business, from Alexis Ohanian's newest tech venture to the effects of inaccurate information from artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on social protests.
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| 0:00.0 | All right. How is everybody in the room doing today? |
| 0:04.0 | Mike. |
| 0:05.0 | I am a wash with physical and psychological stress. |
| 0:11.0 | Oh, no. |
| 0:12.0 | I don't know if anyone knows this, who doesn't live in New York. |
| 0:14.0 | It is very hot here this week. We are in a heat dome. It's very hot. It's very humid. So I'm physically stressed. It's also the last week of school. I have a child finishing school this week. And what that means, basically, if you're a parent, you understand, the last like three weeks of school are just totally fake. And every day there's a party. Every day there's a request that parents bring in snacks. Every other day is a half day. |
| 0:41.1 | Today was color day, wear all your favorite colors. |
| 0:42.5 | Also water day. |
| 0:43.7 | Bring your swimsuit. |
| 0:44.8 | We're going to play with water. |
| 0:45.9 | And it's like, what? |
| 0:48.2 | I can't keep track of this. |
| 0:52.2 | So anyway, I'm stressed for like those little micro reasons. And then obviously there's the bigger sort of existential |
| 0:54.3 | planetary stress happening that I don't think I need to get too much into. But I have been |
| 0:59.8 | watching a lot of CNN. Speaking of checking the news, I played a wedding this weekend. I'm in a band |
| 1:04.6 | and we often get hired for weddings. And somewhere between the ceremony and the reception, |
| 1:10.6 | the United States decided to involve itself in a war in the Mideast. |
| 1:14.6 | I was like, okay, this sort of sucks for the people who are getting married today, but also like we have to throw a party. |
| 1:20.6 | So 20 minutes later, I was on stage playing cover songs and everybody was getting drunk and dancing. Did the wedding guests react? |
| 1:31.6 | Like, was it a topic of conversation at the wedding or were they totally disconnected from |
| 1:35.8 | the news? I think they were maybe not totally disconnected from the news, but they were there to party. |
| 1:41.8 | So a party commenced, uninterrupted. |
... |
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