Hollywood is suing AI creators, but do they use AI too?

Midjourney, an AI tool that generates images based on user descriptions, is locked in a lawsuit with Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. The studios claim Midjourney violated copyright laws by training its systems on their intellectual property. Training, in this context, is the process of feeding vast amounts of data into an AI model—a digital engine designed to identify patterns—so it learns to replicate styles or characters. The studios argue that when a user generates a picture of, say, Darth Vader, it proves the AI is built on stolen property. Now, Midjourney is arguing that if the studios are secretly using similar AI for their own storyboards or brainstorming, it proves that this is standard industry behavior, not a unique form of theft.

To understand this conflict, you have to look at how these engines are built. An AI model is essentially a massive predictive mathematical library. When an artist trains a model, they expose it to millions of images so it can learn relationships between pixels and concepts. If you ask it for a specific character, it is not copying and pasting an image; it is predicting what a picture of that character should look like based on the billions of small, numbered patterns it saved during training. The studios want to stop Midjourney from having access to their movies for this purpose. Midjourney, however, wants to see if the studios are using their own internal versions of similar AI to help draw, sketch, or craft movies. By forcing the studios to reveal their own AI usage, Midjourney hopes to show that the studios benefit from the same technology they are trying to outlaw.

This legal fight exposes a tension between protecting traditional creative work and the fast-evolving reality of AI. If it turns out that major studios are quietly building and using AI to speed up their own creative processes, it creates a massive contradiction in their lawsuits. For the rest of us, this is the first real look at how the shift toward AI will be settled. Are AI models allowed to learn from artists to create something new, or does the power to control these systems belong exclusively to the companies that own the original images? We are about to find out how the law will balance the rights of individual creators against the immense power of new machine-learning technologies.