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Wednesday, April 09, 2025
Blade Runner 2049 AI Lawsuit Rules That Elon Musk's Tesla Can Still Be Sued for Copyright Infringement
gizmodo.com: Things are getting too meta in this dystopian landscape. Blade Runner 2049‘s production company Alcon Entertainment has sued Tesla and Elon Musk for allegedly feeding stills from the Warner Bros. picture to an AI image generator to create promotional material for the car manufacturer.
5 comments:
Reigh Wilson
said...
This is honestly so insane to me that this is even a thing that would happen. And it is incredibly ironic considering the message and dystopian narrative that Blade Runner has for than Elon Musk and Tesla to use that movie with AI to scapegoat the usage of marketing and graphic designer personnel to create promotional images and instead used stills from the movie. I think it is excellent that Blade Runner is suing Tesla and Musk for this as it would feel very contrary to the ideas within the movie itself to let something like that slide, as well as helping showcase how some of these people with the most amount of money are so tone deaf to pieces of work critiquing their systems that they do something like this. I hope that Tesla gets held responsible, but I feel it is unlikely that any real change will come from this either way.
I remember commenting on another article about this when it first happened. At the time I definitely believed that Musk had used the stills to make his AI image. The fact that he had previously tried to use trademarked parts of Blade Runner 2049 for his promotion, and then when denied had material that looked eerily similar to the parts he wanted to use is too much to be a coincidence. I am still of the opinion that Musk took the images without permission. Although I sympathize with the judge's ruling due to there not being enough evidence, I don't like the precedent this sets for the future. AI is in such a dangerous state right now, since it is so unregulated. Situations like this tell those who benefit from it that they can get away with stealing images and not compensating the creators. It simply enrages me when those in power and with large checkbooks get away with things like this.
Political views aside, this is a really interesting case. If it is true and Musk used AI to create the promotional materials by feeding an image from Blade Runner to it, then yes it is copyright infringement. However If Musk had promotionals drawn up for his presentation under the guise that he would have the rights to use things from the movie and then was denied the rights hours before the presentation (which is what the article said) then it is possible he threw it in AI so he would have something to present. “The Judge Ruled, ‘Given the tight time frame Musk and Tesla were working with in light of their last-minute request—and the resulting last-minute denial—to make use of BR2049, it is not at all implausible for Plaintiff to allege on information-and-belief that they made use of an AI image-generator to come up with the finished product.” I will be very interested to see how this case turns out...
I LOVE BLADE RUNNER RAHHH!!!! I'm not gonna lie, I love petty copyright laws like this. Like you know what yeah you came up with the opinion and made money off of it so now you have the right to sue some low life loser like musk. I'm all for suing elon musk. People with the money lying around like this should do it more often to be honest. I'm just shocked how lazy people with so much money are with their marketing. Why would a company as rich as tesla look to AI for design and marketing purposes. They could hire a team (I know they most definitely already have one) with an individual team for each person with then each person's own graphic designer. Its a little funny though because even if Tesla had all of that, their design ideas and general marketing would still be sugar honey iced tea.
This is so funny. Blade Runner GO OFF! I mean, I feel like it's known information at this point that tech companies like Tesla and the like are stealing artistic intellectual property from the artistic and entertainment industries with their AI generators and algorithms. This lawsuit is so petty and I am so glad that these big movies are standing up for smaller artists and filmmakers by showing the cheese man that we will not stand for this kind of behavior. The part about the lawsuit also targeting the bad association is so funny, because it is true, it feels like anything that comes out of elon musk's mouth is bad press for the original content. To the matter of the lawsuit, I feel like there needs to be established and clear precedent on the fact that the material used to teach AI needs to have permissions to be used, because the amount of copyright infringement that has been allowed to run rampant is, at this point, a fault of the courts. The materials made by AI are not no ones intellectual property, they are the intellectual property of the things that were used to train the AI.
5 comments:
This is honestly so insane to me that this is even a thing that would happen. And it is incredibly ironic considering the message and dystopian narrative that Blade Runner has for than Elon Musk and Tesla to use that movie with AI to scapegoat the usage of marketing and graphic designer personnel to create promotional images and instead used stills from the movie. I think it is excellent that Blade Runner is suing Tesla and Musk for this as it would feel very contrary to the ideas within the movie itself to let something like that slide, as well as helping showcase how some of these people with the most amount of money are so tone deaf to pieces of work critiquing their systems that they do something like this. I hope that Tesla gets held responsible, but I feel it is unlikely that any real change will come from this either way.
I remember commenting on another article about this when it first happened. At the time I definitely believed that Musk had used the stills to make his AI image. The fact that he had previously tried to use trademarked parts of Blade Runner 2049 for his promotion, and then when denied had material that looked eerily similar to the parts he wanted to use is too much to be a coincidence. I am still of the opinion that Musk took the images without permission. Although I sympathize with the judge's ruling due to there not being enough evidence, I don't like the precedent this sets for the future. AI is in such a dangerous state right now, since it is so unregulated. Situations like this tell those who benefit from it that they can get away with stealing images and not compensating the creators. It simply enrages me when those in power and with large checkbooks get away with things like this.
Political views aside, this is a really interesting case. If it is true and Musk used AI to create the promotional materials by feeding an image from Blade Runner to it, then yes it is copyright infringement. However If Musk had promotionals drawn up for his presentation under the guise that he would have the rights to use things from the movie and then was denied the rights hours before the presentation (which is what the article said) then it is possible he threw it in AI so he would have something to present. “The Judge Ruled, ‘Given the tight time frame Musk and Tesla were working with in light of their last-minute request—and the resulting last-minute denial—to make use of BR2049, it is not at all implausible for Plaintiff to allege on information-and-belief that they made use of an AI image-generator to come up with the finished product.” I will be very interested to see how this case turns out...
I LOVE BLADE RUNNER RAHHH!!!! I'm not gonna lie, I love petty copyright laws like this. Like you know what yeah you came up with the opinion and made money off of it so now you have the right to sue some low life loser like musk. I'm all for suing elon musk. People with the money lying around like this should do it more often to be honest. I'm just shocked how lazy people with so much money are with their marketing. Why would a company as rich as tesla look to AI for design and marketing purposes. They could hire a team (I know they most definitely already have one) with an individual team for each person with then each person's own graphic designer. Its a little funny though because even if Tesla had all of that, their design ideas and general marketing would still be sugar honey iced tea.
This is so funny. Blade Runner GO OFF! I mean, I feel like it's known information at this point that tech companies like Tesla and the like are stealing artistic intellectual property from the artistic and entertainment industries with their AI generators and algorithms. This lawsuit is so petty and I am so glad that these big movies are standing up for smaller artists and filmmakers by showing the cheese man that we will not stand for this kind of behavior. The part about the lawsuit also targeting the bad association is so funny, because it is true, it feels like anything that comes out of elon musk's mouth is bad press for the original content. To the matter of the lawsuit, I feel like there needs to be established and clear precedent on the fact that the material used to teach AI needs to have permissions to be used, because the amount of copyright infringement that has been allowed to run rampant is, at this point, a fault of the courts. The materials made by AI are not no ones intellectual property, they are the intellectual property of the things that were used to train the AI.
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