Chat GPT Is Eating the World

The copyright lawsuits keep coming. Alcon Entertainment, which owns the copyright to the movie Blade Runner 2049, has sued Elon Musk, Tesla, and Warner Brothers for allegedly infringing a scene from the movie.

From the allegations in the Complaint:

Defendants requested permission to use an iconic still image (Exhibit
A) from Alcon’s “Blade Runner 2049” motion picture (“BR2049” or the “Picture”)
to promote Tesla’s new fully autonomous cybercab in an October 10, 2024 event
that was livestreamed worldwide from WBDI’s Burbank, California studio lot.
Alcon refused all permissions and adamantly objected to Defendants suggesting
any affiliation between BR2049 and Tesla, Musk or any Musk-owned company.
Defendants then used an apparently AI-generated faked image to do it all anyway.

Defendants apparently fed the Exhibit A Image, and similarly iconic
images from the same visual sequence at BR2049’s dramatic core (Exhibit B), into
an AI-driven image generator, and then directed the AI to make a lightly stylized
fake screen still from BR2049 (Exhibit C).

Defendants then made this faked image the second presentation slide of the event, displaying it full screen on the livestream feed for 11 seconds (a marketing and advertising eternity) at the opening of Musk’s cybercab sales pitch remarks.

During those 11 seconds, Musk tried awkwardly to explain why he
was showing the audience a picture of BR2049 when he was supposed to be talking
about his new product. He really had no credible reason. Musk ostensibly invited the global audience to think about the cybercab’s possibilities in juxtaposition to
BR2049’s fictional future. But it all exuded an odor of thinly contrived excuse to
link Tesla’s cybercab to strong Hollywood brands at a time when Tesla and Musk
are on the outs with Hollywood.1 Which of course is exactly what it was.

It was hardly coincidental that the only specific Hollywood film which
Musk actually discussed to pitch his new, fully autonomous, AI-driven cybercab
was BR2049 – a film which just happens to feature a strikingly-designed,
artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car throughout the story. Especially where
Defendants had asked Alcon’s permission to use BR2049 and been so firmly
refused, this was clearly all a bad faith and intentionally malicious gambit by
Defendants to make the otherwise stilted and stiff content of the joint WBDI-Tesla
event more attractive to the global audience and to misappropriate BR2049’s brand
to help sell Teslas.

Here’s where Musk used the generated image and referred to the movie Blade Runner (2049).