Latest news with #DarthVader
India Today
11 hours ago
- Entertainment
- India Today
Midjourney launches V1 AI video generation model right after Disney accuses it of plagiarism
Midjourney, the AI startup famous for its surreal image generation tools, is making a bold leap into video. Recently, the company unveiled V1, its long-awaited video-generation model that promises to breathe life into your static images. It's a big move for Midjourney as it throws the company into direct competition with other big-hitters like OpenAI, Runway, Adobe and Google.V1 is designed as an image-to-video model, allowing users to transform either their own uploaded pictures or Midjourney's AI-generated images into short five-second video clips. Like its sibling image models, V1 is only accessible via Discord for now and is web-only at launch. advertisementAnd it's not just videos Midjourney has in its sights. In a blog post, CEO David Holz set out some pretty ambitious goals for the company's AI, saying V1 is just the next stepping stone toward real-time 'open-world simulations.' The company also revealed its plans to branch into 3D renderings and real-time generative models down the line. While Midjourney's image tools have long appealed to artists and designers, the company has taken a slightly different tack with video. Many of its rivals — such as Sora by OpenAI, Runway's Gen-4, Firefly by Adobe and Veo 3 by Google — are going after commercial filmmakers and studios with highly controllable AI tools. Midjourney, however, is positioning itself as more of a creative playground for those looking for something a little more V1 AI video generation model: Pricing and availabilityadvertisementDespite this, Midjourney is pushing ahead. Video generation doesn't come cheap, though. V1 consumes eight times more credits per clip than Midjourney's still-image tools, so subscribers will burn through their monthly allowances far faster. At launch, Basic subscribers — who pay $10 (around Rs 866) per month — can access V1, but unlimited video generation is limited to the $60 (around Rs 5,200) Pro and $120 (approximately Rs 10,400) Mega plans, and only on the 'Relax' mode, which produces videos more slowly. However, the company says it will review this pricing structure in the coming weeks as it gathers feedback from for the tools themselves, V1 offers a surprising level of control. You can opt for an 'auto' mode that lets the AI generate motion for you or a 'manual' mode that accepts text prompts to dictate exactly how you want your animation to move. Plus, there are settings for adjusting movement intensity — 'low motion' if you want subtle shifts, or 'high motion' for more energetic effects. Clips last five seconds by default but can be extended up to 21 seconds in four-second accuses Midjourney of plagiarismThat said, Midjourney is entering the video arena under a legal cloud. Only a week ago, Disney and Universal sued the startup over its image-generation models, claiming they can produce unauthorised versions of famous characters like Darth Vader and Homer Simpson. It's part of a growing backlash across Hollywood as studios grow nervous about AI tools replacing human creatives — and AI companies face questions about training data and copyright examples of V1's output suggest Midjourney is sticking to its trademark surreal aesthetic rather than aiming for hyper-realism, the sort of style that fans of the platform have come to love. The initial reaction from users has been mostly positive so far, though it's still too early to tell how V1 will stack up against more established players like Runway and Sora.
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
£30k for being compared to Darth Vader. £25k for a birthday card. £17k for being called a wierdo. How Britain's employment tribunals became a laughing stock... and have reached breaking point
When Lorna Rooke's NHS colleagues entered her personality traits into a light-hearted online quiz to gauge which Star Wars character she most resembled, they had no idea this apparently innocent piece of workplace banter would lead to a court hearing and ultimately cost the taxpayer £30,000. But then the blood donation worker was told she allegedly bore most similarity to Darth Vader. Ms Rooke decided it was no laughing matter and took her bosses to an employment tribunal.
Los Angeles Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Hollywood's fight against alleged AI copyright infringement has only just begun
It was only a matter of time before the major Hollywood studios started taking the fight to the artificial intelligence industry over its alleged abuse of intellectual property. Now, it's on. Last week, Walt Disney Co. and Universal Pictures sued AI firm Midjourney in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, accusing the popular image generator of blatantly copying and profiting from copyrighted images of characters from franchises such as 'Star Wars,' 'Minions,' 'Cars,' Marvel, 'The Simpsons' and 'Shrek.' The complaint cited numerous examples, illustrated with dozens of striking photos, of San Francisco-based Midjourney's technology being used to generate virtually indistinguishable copies of Darth Vader, Iron Man, Bart, Woody and Elsa, sometimes in frames quite similar to scenes from the actual movies and TV shows. The lawsuit says Midjourney employed such images to promote its subscription service and encourage the use of its image generator. The companies are seeking unspecified monetary compensation, as well as a court order to stop Midjourney from further infringement, including by using studio-owned material to train its upcoming video tool. 'Midjourney is the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism,' Disney and Universal's lawyers wrote in the 110-page complaint. 'Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing.' The stakes of this battle are high, according to the studios. The AI company's misuse of Disney and Universal's intellectual property 'threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts,' the court document said. Midjourney has not responded to requests for comment. AI companies have typically argued that they are protected by 'fair use' doctrine, which allows for the limited reproduction of material without permission from the copyright holder. Midjourney founder David Holz in 2022 told Forbes that the company did not seek permission from copyright holders, saying 'there isn't really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from.' This battle is a long time coming. Artists — including screenwriters, animators, illustrators and other entertainment industry workers — have been raising the alarm for years about the threat of AI, not just to their actual jobs but to the work they create. AI models are trained on anything and everything that's publicly available on the internet, which includes copyrighted material owned by studios or the artists themselves, they argue. The Writers Guild of America last year called on the big entertainment companies to take legal action against tech giants and startups in order to put a stop to such 'theft.' But this is the first time any of the major film studios have gone after an AI company for copyright infringement. They may not be the last. The studios are following the lead of the New York Times and other publishers, who sued OpenAI and its backer Microsoft over alleged plagiarism. The major music labels have also taken AI firms to court over the use of copyrighted music. Studios are in an awkward position because they're weighing the possibility of licensing their content to AI firms or using the technology for their own purposes. Reid Southen, a Michigan-based film concept artist whose research on AI was cited at length in the lawsuit, said he hopes Disney and Universal's complaint encourages others to take a similar stance. 'Hopefully, I think other studios are looking at what's going on with Disney and Universal now, and considering, 'Hey, what about our properties?'' said Southen, who has worked on studio films including 'The Matrix Resurrections,' 'The Hunger Games' and 'Blue Beetle.' 'If Universal and Disney think they have a strong enough case to pursue this, I would hope other studios would take note of that and maybe pursue it as well.' Southen became part of the story in December 2023, after the release of Midjourney v6 started making waves online. He saw someone use the tech to generate an image of Joaquin Phoenix as the Joker, and he started messing around with it himself to see what kinds of copyrighted material he could prompt it to rip off. He posted the results on social media, which led AI researcher Gary Marcus to reach out. Marcus and Southen published an in-depth article for IEEE Spectrum in January 2024, making the case that Midjourney and other well-funded AI firms were training their models on copyrighted work without their permission or compensation and spitting out images nearly identical to the studios' own material. That article illustrated how simple prompts could produce nearly exact replicas of famous film and TV characters. The prompts didn't necessarily need to ask for a particular character by name. The researchers were able to coax uncanny images from AI with prompts as basic as 'animated toys' (resulting in pictures of 'Toy Story' characters) and 'videogame plumber' (which turned up versions of Mario from 'Super Mario'). According to Marcus and Southen, all it took was the phrase 'popular movie screencap' to evoke a picture similar to an actual frame from 'Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice' or 'The Dark Knight.' 'It shows that they are very clearly trained on hundreds, if not thousands, of movies and YouTube videos and screen caps and all this stuff, because I was able to find matching screen caps and images, not just from trailers, but from deep in movies themselves,' Southen said. The Midjourney examples were the most egregious, Southen said, but the company was not the only offender. For instance, OpenAI's image generation technology DALL-E was also capable of producing 'plagiaristic' images of copyrighted characters without prompting them specifically by name, Southen said, echoing the findings of his and Marcus' IEEE Spectrum article. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The Disney and Universal lawsuit did not name OpenAI, which is also responsible for the video generator Sora that is trying to take the film business by storm. Many chatbots and text-to-image tools have guardrails around intellectual property, but they clearly have limitations. Ask ChatGPT to create an image of Kermit the Frog, and it will flatly reject the request. However, for example, I was recently able to request a picture of a Muppet-like female pig character, and the result was not unlike Miss Piggy, though I wouldn't quite say it was a one-for-one copy. Southen argues that this is a sign of a serious flaw in large language model training — the fact that they've already been fed on so much publicly available data. 'Sometimes it's not giving you something that's spot-on, but it's giving you enough that you know that it knows what it's doing,' he said. 'Like, you know where it's pulling from.' In public comments, studio executives have made it clear that they're not against AI as a whole. 'We are bullish on the promise of AI technology and optimistic about how it can be used responsibly as a tool to further human creativity,' said Horacio Gutierrez, Disney's chief legal and compliance officer, in a statement on the lawsuit. As media industry expert Peter Csathy put it in a recent newsletter, there's a right way and a wrong way to do AI. But even doing it the right way will be disruptive. Use of AI for storyboarding and pre-visualization could save millions of dollars, which translates to more job losses in the entertainment industry. Lionsgate and AMC Networks have announced deals to use AI to streamline operations and processes. For artists like Southen, that's a troubling reality. He said he has seen his annual income shrink in half since generative AI technology came on the scene. 'You can point at things like the strikes and other stuff going on, but the story is the same for most of the people that I know — that their income since all this stuff came has been dramatically impacted,' he said. 'Work that was otherwise very steady for me for a long time is just nowhere to be found anymore.' Streaming just notched a significant milestone. The technology's share of total television usage overtook the combined viewership of broadcast and cable for the first time, according to Nielsen. Streaming represented 44.8% of TV viewership in May 2025, the data firm said, marking a record, while broadcast clocked in at 20.1% and cable garnered 24.1% for a combined 44.2% going to linear viewing. Nielsen cautioned that rankings may fluctuate because broadcast networks still command a tremendous share of eyeballs, particularly when NFL football airs. I caught some stellar acts at the Hollywood's Bowl's Blue Note Jazz Festival on Saturday. Shout-out to saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin and bassist Derrick Hodge. Here's Benjamin's Tiny Desk Concert performance for NPR.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Hollywood Showdown Begins: Disney And Universal Sue $300M AI Startup Midjourney For 'Bottomless Pit Of Plagiarism' In Blockbuster Case
Disney (NYSE:DIS) and Universal, the powerhouse studios behind Star Wars, Frozen, and Kung Fu Panda, have filed a major copyright lawsuit involving an AI startup, described by Entrepreneur as a potential first for Hollywood. The case targets Midjourney, a text-to-image generator that allegedly enabled users to produce visuals featuring copyrighted characters owned by the studios. Filed in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, the 110-page complaint accuses Midjourney of building a commercial enterprise off protected intellectual property. According to the lawsuit, the studios had issued cease-and-desist letters to Midjourney's counsel, demanding the unauthorized content be stopped. Don't Miss: Maker of the $60,000 foldable home has 3 factory buildings, 600+ houses built, and big plans to solve housing — Peter Thiel turned $1,700 into $5 billion—now accredited investors are eyeing this software company with similar breakout potential. Learn how you can 'Midjourney, which has attracted millions of subscribers and made $300 million last year alone, is focused on its own bottom line and ignored Plaintiffs' demands,' the filing reads. When those warnings were ignored, Disney and Universal moved forward with legal action. The lawsuit says that Midjourney's paid plans reportedly range from $10 to $120 per month, contributing to its explosive financial growth since launching. Founded in 2021, Midjourney has grown rapidly by offering AI-generated images within seconds, fueled entirely by user prompts. With just 11 full-time employees, the company describes itself as a small, self-funded operation. The lawsuit alleges its rapid expansion has come at the expense of long-established copyrights, turning beloved characters into AI fodder without authorization. Trending: Invest where it hurts — and help millions heal:. The lawsuit highlights a roster of well-known characters allegedly reproduced by Midjourney's platform. Disney's complaint cites the unauthorized use of Darth Vader from Star Wars, Elsa from Frozen, Lightning McQueen from Cars, and Homer Simpson from The Simpsons. Universal's claims include the depiction of Minions from Despicable Me, Po from Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, as well as Hiccup and Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon. According to the filing, only the studios maintain legal rights to commercialize these characters and develop content or merchandise around them. One line in the complaint describes Midjourney as a "bottomless pit of plagiarism," accusing the startup of undermining the basic framework of U.S. copyright law. The studios are seeking a jury trial to establish boundaries around what generative AI platforms can legally the filing, Disney and Universal frame the lawsuit as more than a defense of individual characters, describing Midjourney's business model as a direct threat to the creative economy and the broader U.S. film industry. Calling the infringement "systematic, ongoing, and willful," the plaintiffs argue the damage is both substantial and irreparable, not just to their own properties but to the incentive system that fuels the $260 billion American motion picture economy. The lawsuit arrives during a critical moment for AI litigation. Just one week prior, Reddit (NYSE:RDDT) filed its own suit against Anthropic, alleging unauthorized use of its forum content for AI training purposes, The Wall Street Journal reports. Getty Images (NYSE:GETY) is also pursuing a multimillion dollar case against Stability AI for allegedly scraping over 12 million copyrighted visuals from its platform. Read Next: Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Image: Shutterstock UNLOCKED: 5 NEW TRADES EVERY WEEK. Click now to get top trade ideas daily, plus unlimited access to cutting-edge tools and strategies to gain an edge in the markets. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Hollywood Showdown Begins: Disney And Universal Sue $300M AI Startup Midjourney For 'Bottomless Pit Of Plagiarism' In Blockbuster Case originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
Top Gear
4 days ago
- Automotive
- Top Gear
Audi Q6 Sportback e-tron Interior Layout & Technology
Interior What is it like on the inside? If we say it's the usual Audi fare in here, that's not to diminish the impact of slipping into Darth Vader's bijou living room. It's all high-def screens and black gloss in here, and it can be a bit overwhelming at first. Doesn't quite feel as roomy inside as it looks like it's going to be, a sort of reverse TARDIS. What are all those screens about? Audi calls the dashboard a 'digital stage', and it does look like something that would form the backdrop to a pop starlet skipping about onstage at the O2. Advertisement - Page continues below You've got an 11.9in digital dashboard display rammed with information, a 14.5in touchscreen infotainment that bestrides the front of the car like a particularly obnoxious behemoth, and then an optional 10.9in passenger display that you can download a variety of apps for (but also allows control over the satnav and, frightfully, the audio). What it doesn't do is allow the passenger to control their aircon temperature and seat heating, that remains resolutely at the bottom corner of the ginormo screen that curves towards the driver. Is there any fun tech onboard? Depends on how excited you might be about your front passenger downloading a karaoke app to the optional third screen. The augmented reality head-up display is actually quite fun – Audi has developed a colour set-up that works with where your eyes will be focused to make it look like the virtual images are floating up to 200 metres away. Think large pulsating arrows signalling your next turn, large pulsating red lines that warn you're too close to the car in front, and speed limit reminders that sit on the road before bouncing up to sit on the side of the info display. A bit frenetic, perhaps. Advertisement - Page continues below Is it practical? Given that its main selling point is that it's the coupe version of a more practical family electric SUV, you'd be forgiven for imagining that it's a bit of a squeeze onboard. But Audi says that it has put a bit of effort into trying to ensure the Q6 Sportback e-tron remains roomy and useful. That effort hasn't extended to meaningful headroom in the back of the car, which is obviously compromised by the gracefully curving roof, but no one ever bought a coupe-SUV because they liked their rear passengers. Legroom is decent enough, and the middle seat is useful for occasional use despite the slight raise in the floor. You've got a 511-litre boot out back that expands to 1,373 litres of space with all the rear seats tipped down, and a 64-litre frunk under the bonnet to stash your cables and things. Audi says it's only lost 15 litres of boot space from Q6 to Q6 Sportback, but that's nonsense because it only measures to the window line. If you need to ram things in then obviously the SUV model is the better one to have.
