Disney aims its lawyers at Character.ai over the use of its characters in AI chatbots – and Character.ai doesn’t put up much of a fight. It feels like we’re coming to crunch point in the world of generative AI, and the ecosystem where big tech companies have been helping themselves to copyright work to ‘train’ ... Disney lawyers take aim at another AI company, sends cease and desist
Disney aims its lawyers at Character.ai over the use of its characters in AI chatbots – and Character.ai doesn’t put up much of a fight.
It feels like we’re coming to crunch point in the world of generative AI, and the ecosystem where big tech companies have been helping themselves to copyright work to ‘train’ their heat-generating technology is being challenged. Crucially, by companies who also have access to a lot of money.
The Walt Disney Company has already been part of at least one piece of AI litigation, and now it’s sent a cease and desist letter to a company called Character.ai. This is a service that allows users to have conversations with AI bots, and looking at the service it sells itself as “Try Character.AI, the #1 AI chat app. Endless Characters. Infinite adventures. And a community of creators just like you.”
The problem is – well, there are lots of problems, but specific to this – that Character.ai was offering Disney-owned characters to have conversations with. Uncharacteristically for an AI company, it didn’t appear to have asked Disney’s permission first.
Disney isn’t happy.
Its complaint part-reads…
It has come to Disney’s attention that Character Technologies, Inc. (“Character.ai”) has been using Disney’s copyrighted characters as interactive chatbots in its commercial Character.ai service without authorization. Apparently trained without authorization on Disney’s copyrighted works, the Character.ai service features countless chatbots that exploit Disney’s copyrighted works and trademarks, presenting immersive versions of Disney’s famous and beloved characters.
These actions mislead and confuse consumers, including vulnerable young people, to believe that they are interacting with Disney’s characters, and to falsely believe that Disney has licensed these characters to, and endorsed their use by, Character.ai
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Character.ai, meanwhile, hasn’t even put up a fight, telling Deadline that “we respond swiftly to requests to remove content that rightsholders report to us”. Almost as if it hadn’t noticed the Disney characters that were being offered.
In fact, it also added that “It’s like fan fiction, but in an interactive form. However, it’s always up to rightsholders to decide how people may interact with their IP.”
Or, more to the point, it appears to be trying to put the onus on rightsholders to notice that their material is being used without their permission. Taking a look at the Character.ai site, in fact, one of the first characters I spotted was one from the world of Harry Potter. Several musical acts are in there too.
Anyway: whether Disney will now go for recompense remains to be seen. But its lawyers are clearly watching, and the AI industry might have found a difficult foe to lift material from.
