Companies like OpenAI and Midjourney have opened Pandora’s box, opening them up to considerable legal trouble by training their chatbots on the vastness of the internet while largely turning a blind eye to copyright. As professor and author Gary Marcus and film industry concept artist Reid Southen, who has worked on several major films for the likes of Marvel and Warner Brothers, argue in a recent piece for IEEE Spectrum, tools like DALL-E 3 and Midjourney could land both companies in a “copyright minefield.” It’s a heated debate that’s reaching fever pitch. The news comes after the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging it was responsible for “billions of dollars” in damages by training ChatGPT and other large language models on its content without express permission. Well-known authors including “Game of Thrones” author George RR Martin and John Grisham recently made similar arguments in a separate copyright infringement case. And at least one prominent group of artists has filed a class action suit against Midjourney and its competitor Stability AI, alleging that their image-generating AIs have been misusing their copyrighted work. Lending weight to those complaints, it’s true that AI image generators like Midjourney and OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 can also easily be used to produce potentially copyright-infringing images, as Marcus and Southen show in a series of experiments. “After a bit of experimentation (and in a discovery that led us to collaborate), Southen found that it was in fact easy to generate many plagiaristic outputs, with brief prompts…AI Image Generators Are Spitting Out Copyrighted Characters, Raising Possibility of Catastrophic Lawsuit