As part of an ongoing legal dispute with three Hollywood studios, AI startup Midjourney is seeking to compel those studios to reveal how they use AI themselves. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney for alleged copyright infringement last year, noting that the startup’s image-generation models could create images of characters owned by the studios.

The current dispute revolves around the documentation the studios will need to produce during the discovery process. A judge previously ruled that the studios would indeed have to provide information about their generative AI usage – but only when it led to “consumer-facing” videos and images. Midjourney seeks to overturn this limitation, arguing that it ‘unfairly’ allows the studios to cherry-pick documents while depriving them of evidence that could support its defenses.

In its latest filing, Midjourney claims that the 'documents [the studios] are withholding are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing.' For example, if the studios are developing image-generating AI models ‘for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.'

Midjourney also argues that the studios should reveal all the prompts they used in Midjourney, as well as the resulting outputs, not just the prompts that produced the allegedly infringing images. In response, the studios’ lead attorney David Singer claimed Midjourney was seeking this documentation as part of a ‘fishing expedition.’