Author’s Note for PARQOR Platinum members: The promised presentation will be delayed until next Tuesday. Recent AI clips with Google’s Veo 3 are more topical and hit on a few important themes being covered by The Medium.

Also, on Thursday I will be interviewing Tom Paton, the filmmaker behind “Where The Robots Grow” and now the founder & CEO of AImation, a new platform combining AI-driven production with microtransaction-based distribution.

If you are a PARQOR Platinum member and would like to participate in the Q&A of th interview, please respond to this email.

Also, if you are an existing subscriber and would like a discount to upgrade your membership to PARQOR Platinum to participate in this interview, please response to this email.

It promises be a good, fun and robust conversation and also an unusual opportunity to connect with Tom.

Two developments this week may have left your head spinning:

1. The emergence of Google Veo 3-generated Star Wars “Stormtrooper Vlogs” on social media channels, which do not appear to be Disney-approved (they involve drinking and cursing); and,

2. Disney joined NBCUniversal in a lawsuit against Midjourney, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, alleging copyright infringement.

In the first, Disney may be quietly experimenting in the generative-AI space, though a video about the Stormtroopers at the Los Angeles riots suggests otherwise. An AI-generated video of Superman making a tasteless (and arguably racist) joke while rescuing an Asian woman implied that Warner Bros. Discovery was also testing these waters.

In the second, Disney is aggressively policing the generative AI space in line with Disney CEO Robert Iger’s three precautionary measures for embracing AI:

1. The IP is being protected which is “incredibly important”;

2. Disney creators are being respected; and,

3. Disney customers are being “considered and valued, particularly as this technology emerges rapidly.”

However, those measures do not reconcile with binary framing of the complaint filed against Midjourney:

Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing. Midjourney’s conduct misappropriates Disney’s and Universal’s intellectual property and threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television, and other creative arts.”

Having worked inside a large media company (Viacom, 2005-2017), I am quite familiar with this contradictory approach. It would not be unusual for the legal division to have business reasons to pursue a lawsuit against Midjourney while looking the other way on Stormtrooper Vlogs. I wrote back in April that Disney “very rarely copyright challenges” AI-generated videos with its IP—like the fake trailers created by YouTube channels Screen Culture and KH Studio—despite the IP being the major resource for the channel.

None of this seems to reconcile. So how do we begin to make sense of it all?

Here is one theory that makes sense of this contradiction: Disney is testing the waters to better understand the inevitable outcome of it becoming a licensor to AI platforms.

A Question of Intent

At the heart of Disney and NBCUniversal’s lawsuit against Midjourney is that generative AI is effectively “a virtual vending machine, generating endless unauthorized copies of Disney’s and Universal’s copyrighted works.” Midjourney is accused of generating images and videos that “blatantly incorporate and copy Disney’s and Universal’s famous characters—without investing a penny in their creation”, making the company “the quintessential copyright free-rider and a bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

There is one technical problem with this argument: Midjourney cannot produce these specific images and videos unless a user specifically asks it to.

Key Takeaway: Disney's contradictory AI headlines this week—suing some platforms while experimenting with others—reveal how major IP holders are secretly preparing for the inevitable shift from content creation to AI platform licensing.