The legal brawl between Midjourney and Hollywood’s biggest studios just took a combative turn. The AI image generator is now trying to force Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to open their own books and reveal exactly how they use artificial intelligence behind the scenes.
The backdrop: the three studios are suing Midjourney over alleged widespread copyright infringement, pointing to the tool’s ability to spit out recognizable characters like Yoda from Star Wars on demand. Midjourney isn’t disputing that its model can do this. Instead, it argues that training AI on copyrighted material counts as fair use — and, more pointedly, that the studios suing it are quietly running similar generative AI tools internally.
“They are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing,” the company claims in its filings. It’s the courtroom equivalent of “you first.”
A judge has already ruled that the studios must hand over information about their AI use — but only for “consumer-facing” tools. Midjourney wants that limitation thrown out. In its latest filing, the company argues the earlier ruling lets studios “cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.” It’s now asking a federal judge to overturn that decision and compel disclosure of how much AI is baked into Hollywood productions.
Midjourney attorney Bobby Ghajar laid out the strategy bluntly: “If Plaintiffs are doing the very thing they seek to punish, that evidence goes to the heart of Midjourney’s fair use and unclean hands defenses.” He went further, suggesting that if the studios are “developing image-generating AI models — trained on unlicensed, third-party copyrighted data — for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV,” then that alone would prove downloading and training on unlicensed copyrighted content is “an industry custom, even among the studios themselves.”
The studios aren’t buying it. Their attorney, David Singer, previously dismissed the effort as a “fishing expedition” designed to distract from Midjourney’s alleged misdeeds. “Plaintiffs simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows,” he said, framing the case as nothing more exotic than a standard copyright holder defending “the same rights any copyright holder would assert against any infringer, AI-powered or otherwise.”
The dispute cuts to an uncomfortable truth about the entertainment business: Hollywood has been notoriously reluctant to reveal how it leans on generative AI, a technology many creatives openly resent. Midjourney’s discovery gambit could change that — or at least drag the industry’s internal AI habits into the daylight.
For now, the outcome rests with a federal judge weighing whether the studios’ own AI use is fair game. Either way, the fight over generative AI in film and TV is no longer just about what Midjourney’s tool can generate — it’s about what everyone else has been quietly generating too.
