Introduction

The Wild West of copyrighted characters in AI may be coming to an end. Disney has sent a cease and desist letter to Google, alleging the company's AI tools are infringing Disney's copyrights on a massive scale.

Technical Details

According to the letter, Google is violating Disney's intellectual property in multiple ways. The legal notice states that Google has copied a large corpus of Disney works to train its gen AI models, which is believable, as Google's image and video models can happily produce popular Disney characters without feeding the models lots of Disney data.

Other ways Google is infringing on Disney's copyrights include distributing "copies of its protected works" to consumers. This includes all those memes you've been making with Disney characters. The letter calls out a huge number of Disney-owned properties that can be prompted into existence in Google AI, including The Lion King, Deadpool, and Star Wars.

Practical Implications

The cease and desist notice from Disney could have significant implications for the AI industry. If its claim is upheld, this could limit the use of protected data in AI training environments.
The suspension could also serve as a landmark case in the history of copyright law and artificial intelligence.