Well, it didn’t take long. A full seven days — that’s how long Midjourney waited after getting smacked with a lawsuit by Disney and Universal before flipping the bird and dropping their spicy new toy: V1, a video-generation tool that can cough up moving clips of Shrek, Deadpool, and probably anyone else with a trademarked face and a billion-dollar franchise.
Let’s break it down: Disney and Universal are understandably a wee bit miffed that their intellectual property is being memed into existence by an AI that gives zero craps about licensing. So they sued. Because of course they did.
But what does Midjourney do in response? Curl up and lawyer up like a sensible startup? Nah. They crank up the chaos and basically say, “Here’s Shrek doing backflips in 4K. Deal with it.”
This move is either digital-age punk rock or the AI version of licking a frozen pole in the middle of a lawsuit blizzard. Either way, users are thrilled. Legal departments? Probably less so.
Midjourney’s clearly aiming to become the Netflix of copyright infringement. Their bets are on the fact that the law can’t sprint as fast as their software can generate pixel-perfect parodies.
But let’s be real: pissing off Disney — the corporate Death Star of cute rodents and ruthless lawyers — is not exactly a long-term growth strategy unless your escape plan involves a one-way ticket to Mars.
Still, as long as the V1 tool keeps pumping out meme-worthy magic, the internet will eat it up with a side of moral ambiguity and a sprinkling of ‘lol who cares.’
So buckle up. The next episode of ‘Silicon Valley: Hold My Beer Edition’ looks like it’s going to be lit — or litigated.