Copyright battles over AI-generated images have taken center stage in recent months, with an increasing number of entertainment giants starting to pursue legal action.

First, San Francisco-based AI platform Midjourney was hit with a copyright infringement complaint filed by Disney and NBCUniversal, which were later joined by Warner Bros. Discovery. The three studios alleged the platform was distributing images that were strikingly similar to their copyrighted material. And this week, they’ve joined forces again to file a similar lawsuit against Chinese AI developer MiniMax. 

The studios want to protect their franchises from being used to train the image- and video-generating AI tech, which they argue leads to infringement. For instance, the WBD lawsuit breaks down examples of how many of its kids IPs (like Scooby-Doo, Tweety and various DC superheroes) are generated by Midjourney through prompts.

In a poll this week, Kidscreen asked its industry readers to weigh in on what results they’re expecting from the lawsuits, what concerns they have and how far this legal pressure can influence the wider business.

Respondents were divided on that last part—with a 50-50 split of votes for whether or not this will meaningfully shape how companies approach AI strategy.

Kanji Kazahaya, president and CEO of Japan’s Culture Connect, expects the lawsuits will result in more clarity for the industry, which should help guide companies in understanding which AI tools are and aren’t safe to use.

“AI should expedite the production process and drastically reduce the production costs,” says Kazahaya, who also heads up ZAG’s outpost in Japan. “Thus, the judges should address what kind/area of AI use should be OK; no copyright infringements. That clarification should bring AI use to the next stage.”

But others feared that efforts to completely clamp down on AI trained on copyrighted material might be futile. “Law and regulation will rein in good actors, but there will always be ‘pirates’ in the globalized, democratized tech world, leading to eternal whack-a-mole,” says Dubit’s SVP of global trends David Kleeman. 

Composition Media CEO Carl Reed says the slew of legal cases presents broader implications beyond AI image-generation tools—and questions where responsibility of copyright infringement ultimately lies. If the lawsuits are successful, “any tool used to produce content then is at risk,” he says. “You can copy and paste Mickey Mouse from the web, add it to Photoshop and put it on a product, violating Disney’s rights. But the user, not Photoshop, is at fault.”

The heightened battle for protecting copyrighted material likewise poses a fair-use conundrum for Gen Alpha-dominated spaces like Roblox, where creation is king. “In the user-generated content and creator environment, IP owners will have to decide what’s piracy and what’s fandom,” Kleeman adds.