Can the Studios Sue Their Way Out of the AI Apocalypse?

Plus: A devilish assignment!

Images generated via MidJourney by the New York Times demonstrating the company’s disregard for intellectual property rights.

Sorry to harp so much on AI in recent weeks, but things seem to be coming to a head with the rollout of the new lifelike video models. The studios certainly seem to think so, if the lawsuit filed this week by Disney and Universal against Midjourney are any indication.

Here’s the New York Times on the suit:

The Midjourney lawsuit indicates that Disney and Universal, the two most powerful traditional entertainment companies, have been biding their time. While taking detailed aim at Midjourney for infringing on prominent characters like Darth Vader, the Minions, the “Frozen” princesses, Shrek and Homer Simpson, the lawsuit reads like a shot across the bow to A.I. companies in general.

The studios framed the generative A.I. theft as a problem that “threatens to upend the bedrock incentives of U.S. copyright law that drive American leadership in movies, television and other creative arts.” The U.S. film and television business supports 2.3 million jobs and pays $229 billion in annual wages, according to the most recent economic figures from the Motion Picture Association, a Hollywood lobbying group.

The Times includes a bunch of images of famous Universal and Disney characters like the Minions and Frozen’s Elsa recreated via AI prompt, providing pretty clear-cut evidence that Midjourney has been using copyrighted material to train the program in order to generate works that can be used to compete with the stolen material. I find it hard to believe that any judge or jury would look at this and be like “Yeah that’s probably fine.”

This, of course, calls to mind the effort to shut down Napster via lawsuits in the early 2000s: That was another clear-cut case of copyright infringement and monetary damages to copyright holders that went far beyond fair use and into outright theft. Those who remember that period will likely be little-heartened by the result: Yes, Napster died, but file sharing more or less destroyed the business model of music, leading to the rise of the ruinous-for-artists economics of Spotify and other music-streaming sites.

At the very least, the studios can use these and similar suits to extract some kind of licensing arrangements from the AI services. It’s probably too much to hope for the complete and utter ruin of the purveyors of plagiarist robots. But a boy can dream of Butlerian Jihad.

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Today’s bonus episode of Across the Movie Aisle is sure to be controversial, as Alyssa, Peter, and I discussed which Wes Anderson movie we’d drop from the big Criterion box set of his first 10 films hitting shelves this fall. I hope you give it a listen!

That episode is for paying members only; we paywall very little at the Bulwark, but we do need to keep the lights on somehow. If you haven’t signed up for a membership, maybe now’s a good time? Think it over. No pressure.

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In review: ‘The Life of Chuck’

‘The Life of Chuck’

As I said, The Life of Chuck is effective in that it acknowledges early death is intrinsically unfair, and writer-director Mike Flanagan, adapting a Stephen King short story, understands how to milk this for all its worth. We see Chuck full of life, dancing up a storm on a random street corner, the audience cheering along. It’s a great set piece: well-staged, perfectly edited. I’m a sucker for a good drum solo, and while I’m not one for dancing, I still appreciate seeing rhythm on the screen. We also see Chuck near death, his child and his wife weeping over him, damning the unfairness of it all. We see Chuck as a child, full of hope for the future. We know how that turns out. Mistiness, achieved.

However, rather than serving as a “life-affirming masterpiece,” as the advertising for The Life of Chuck has promised, the whole charade feels weirdly empty, bereft of greater meaning. And that’s because the universe that Chuck has created in his mind—the one where we meet Marty and his ex-wife, who reconcile at their end—has no resonance through the rest of the film, no real connection to his life or what he accomplished or who he loved. A hippy-dippy teacher in Chuck’s elementary school informs him that Walt Whitman’s “I am large, I contain multitudes” refers not to the inherent contradictions of life—the different roles we play, the hypocrisies we reconcile internally—but to an actual universe created by the randomly firing neurons in our brain, an entire cosmos of imagined existences that blink out of existence when we breathe our last. The invocation of Whitman—and, later, Carl Sagan’s famous cosmic calendar, the one that informs us all of human existence takes place a few ticks before midnight in a universe condensed to a year—suggests an effort to create a sort of secular cosmology, a sense of a universe greater than the self.

But the effect is precisely the opposite.

To read the rest of the review, please click here.

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Assigned Viewing: Diablo (VOD)

Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror in ‘Diablo.’

Roger Ebert is a guiding light for critics because he understood a very key function of the critic, which is to measure a film against what it’s trying to do. A Godfather is different from a Porky’s which is in turn different from a John Wick. As Ebert put it once, “If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.” Truly great and truly terrible films can transcend these parameters, of course, but part of the job of the movie reviewer¹ is to steer viewers toward movies that meet expectations.

I mention all this because Diablo is a masterpiece of a certain sort of movie—the low-budget, high-octane, straight-to-video martial arts action flick—while not being, you know, a “masterpiece.” Director Ernesto Díaz Espinoza and stars Scott Adkins and Marko Zaror (who also have writing credits) were trying to make a particular sort of movie, and it kicks ass.

The plot is pretty straightforward, if not quite bare bones: Kris (Adkins) smuggles himself into Colombia in order to kidnap Elisa (Alanna De La Rossa) from her crime boss father, Vicente (Lucho Velasco). In addition to Vicente’s minions, Kris must also fight off El Corvo (Zaror), a psycho with a metal arm. All of this unspools in 90 tight minutes.

This is the sort of movie where any predicament that could be solved with a discussion or even a quick bit of gunplay is instead solved with fists and feet, and we’re happy for it, since it stars Adkins and Zaror. Most folks out there will know Adkins and Zaror from John Wick: Chapter 4 (Adkins played the guy in the fat suit; Zaror was the Marquis’s goatee-sporting head thug), but they are almost indisputably the two greatest VOD action figures of their generation (give or take an Iko Uwais or Yayan Ruhian). Indeed, Diablo is kind of like the Prime Video series Reacher, in that you start to hope our stars get into random disagreements with folks on the street so they’ll have an excuse for a five-minute fistfight.

Adkins, sometimes referred to as “the human special effect” for his facility with martial arts violence, is properly kinetic as Kris. But in many ways, this feels like Zaror’s movie: His Corvo is the titular devil, a sort of maniacal force of nature with a goofy metal arm that just makes everything incredibly fun to watch.

And that’s the whole thing, really: Diablo is just fun. It’s a little silly, never takes itself too seriously, and it has the best fight choreography you’ll see in a movie this year. If you’re into this genre of action flick, you’ll love Diablo.

1. The “movie reviewer” and the “film critic” are cousins, not twins; the former is, at least in part, a service journalist, while the latter is an art critic. For what it’s worth, I consider myself a movie reviewer with occasional pretensions of film critic-hood.