Disney, Comcast sue AI company Midjourney

Walt Disney Co. and Comcast teamed up to sue San Francisco-based Midjourney Inc., accusing the startup of copyright infringement in the latest sign of tension between major media companies and a new crop of artificial intelligence businesses.

Midjourney, which launched publicly in 2022, allows people to create vivid, AI-generated images using prompts. Like its competitors ChatGPT and Stability AI, Midjourney built its AI models with datasets that pull imagery from across the internet. While the companies argue that the practice is legal under the fair use doctrine of U.S. copyright law, it has stoked outrage and lawsuits from a wide range of creative businesses.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in California on Wednesday, Disney and Comcast gave multiple examples where they say Midjourney violated copyrighted characters from films and TV shows including Star Wars, The Simpsons, Shrek and Minions. The companies said they asked Midjourney to stop, but their requests have been ignored. They are seeking $150,000 per infringement.

“Piracy is piracy, and whether an infringing image or video is made with AI or another technology does not make it any less infringing,” the suit says.

A representative for Midjourney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google offers buyouts to more workers

Google has offered buyouts to another swath of its workforce across several key divisions in a fresh round of cost cutting coming ahead of a court decision that could order a breakup of its internet empire. The Mountain View, California, company confirmed the streamlining that was reported by several news outlets.

It’s not clear how many employees are affected, but the offers were made to staff in Google’s search, advertising, research and engineering units, according to The Wall Street Journal. Google employs most of the nearly 186,000 workers on the worldwide payroll of its parent company, Alphabet Inc.

“Earlier this year, some of our teams introduced a voluntary exit program with severance for U.S.-based Googlers, and several more are now offering the program to support our important work ahead,” a Google spokesperson, Courtenay Mencini, said in a statement.

“A number of teams are also asking remote employees who live near an office to return to a hybrid work schedule in order to bring folks more together in-person,” Mencini said.

Google is offering the buyouts while awaiting for a federal judge to determine its fate after its ubiquitous search engine was declared an illegal monopoly as part of nearly 5-year-old case by the U.S. Justice Department.

Whole Foods supplier hack leaves empty shelves

United Natural Foods Inc., a grocery distributor for Amazon’s Whole Foods Market, is working to bring systems back online by Sunday and resume product deliveries after a cyberattack disrupted its operations, leaving some store shelves barren of ice cream, bread and other goods.

The Providence, Rhode Island-based chain shut down IT systems and limited shipping orders after determining on June 5 that intruders had penetrated its network, Chief Executive Officer Sandy Douglas said in an earnings call Tuesday. UNFI is working with customers to find short-term solutions “wherever possible” while it works to bring systems back online, Douglas said.

UNFI also reported the incident to the FBI, he said.

The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike Holdings Inc. is helping UNFI respond to the incident, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it.

Compiled from Bloomberg and Associated Press reports.