After OpenAI deal, Disney demands Google cease-and-desist

Today, Disney and OpenAI announced a surprising partnership, which will allow ChatGPT users to generate content with iconic Disney characters.

In the wake of this news, Variety reported that Disney sent Google a cease and desist notice late Wednesday, threatening legal action over the search giant’s alleged use of Disney intellectual property in its AI models. Disney accuses Google of copyright infringement on a “massive scale,” claiming that Google’s AI models “commercially exploit and distribute” infringing media.

Disney reportedly accused Google of infringing on Disney properties such as Star Wars, Frozen, The Lion King, Moana, The Little Mermaid, dead PoolAnd Guardians of the Galaxy. Disney also accused Google of encouraging users to participate in generative AI trends, such as prompts creating images of “figures” depicting Disney-owned characters. According to Varietyimages of figurines representing Darth Vader, Deadpool, Homer Simpson and Elsa from Frozen were included as examples in the cease and desist letter.

Disney’s recent actions are certainly interesting. Last June, Disney filed a complaint against AI image generation company Midjourney over the use of Disney intellectual property in AI-generated content. At the time, Disney’s lawyers called Midjourney a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

So why did Disney partner with one and only one AI company? By granting OpenAI an exclusive license to use its characters, OpenAI will now be able to argue that Google and other AI companies are violating this license.

When OpenAI launched its Sora AI video platform in October, the company was immediately criticized for allowing users to generate video content. using copyrighted characters from other brands. OpenAI finally announcement that any company could walk away from including Sora character by character.

And in Mashable’s testing of AI image and video generators, we found that most of these AI tools easily produced deepfakes featuring Star Wars and Marvel characters.

Now, Disney has demanded that Google “immediately stop copying, publicly displaying, publicly performing, distributing, and creating derivative works of Disney’s copyrighted characters” in “outputs from Google’s AI services, including through YouTube’s mobile app, YouTube Shorts, and YouTube.”

In addition, Disney wants Google to put in place protections “to ensure that no future production infringes on Disney’s works.”

Indeed, Disney is warning the world of AI.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, filed a lawsuit in April against OpenAI, alleging that it violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.