Disney Calls on Google to Stop Using Its Content in AI Tools

Disney has reportedly sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging copyright infringement by the tech company via its artificial intelligence tools.

In the letter, Disney alleges that Google has used the entertainment company’s content to train its AI models and distributed copies of its work to consumers, Ars Technica reported Thursday (Dec. 11).

Disney calls on Google to stop using that content in its AI tools and to prevent those tools from generating images of Disney-owned characters, according to the report.

Asked about Disney’s letter by Ars Technica, a Google spokesperson said, per the report: “We have a longstanding and mutually beneficial relationship with Disney, and will continue to engage with them. More generally, we use public data from the open web to build our AI and have built innovative copyright controls like Google-extended and Content ID for YouTube, which give sites and copyright holders control over their content.”

This report came on the same day Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI and a three-year licensing agreement that will allow the artificial intelligence firm’s Sora video model to generate short fan-created clips using Disney-owned content.

The agreement allows OpenAI to enable Sora users to generate short clips featuring characters from Disney, Pixar, Marvel and “Star Wars” within a structured environment that limits scenes to approved contexts. It prohibits the use of actor likenesses and restricts Sora prompts that introduce violence, politics or adult themes.

PYMNTS reported Thursday that this is the first time a major studio has formally sanctioned a generative AI platform to use its copyrighted universe.

Google has faced other legal challenges to the use of copyrighted content in its AI tools.

Penske Media, the publisher of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety, filed a lawsuit against Google in September, accusing the company of using Penske’s journalism without permission to fuel AI-generated summaries that appear in search results.

In July, the Independent Publishers Association filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, alleging that Google’s AI Overviews represent an abuse of the company’s market share in online search. The association alleged in its complaint that by positioning these AI-generated summaries, which use publishers’ material, at the top of its search results, Google disadvantages the publishers’ original content.

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