According to WDW News Today, Google’s AI products have begun to refuse to generate Disney-related character content due to accusations of intellectual property infringement by Disney. Foreign media outlet Deadline disclosed on February 9, local time, that tools such as Google Gemini and Nano Banana have currently intercepted generation requests involving Disney characters. This change has only been about two months since Disney issued a cease-and-desist letter in December last year.
It is reported that in January this year, relevant media successfully generated multiple high-quality Disney character images in the above-mentioned Google AI tool through prompt words. However, now that the same prompt words are used, the system will pop up a prompt saying "Due to concerns about third-party content providers, I am temporarily unable to generate this image. Please modify the prompt words and try again." However, there are currently exceptions. If users upload photos of Disney characters and match them with text prompts, Google AI products can still generate relevant IP content.
Going back to December last year, Disney's external lawyer David Singer issued a 32-page cease-and-desist letter to Google, clearly stating that Google AI tools such as Veo, Nano Banana and Gemini "infringe Disney copyrights on a large scale." The letter is attached with example pictures, which visually demonstrate that through simple prompt words, these tools can generate detailed renderings of Disney characters such as Darth Vader and Iron Man. Disney made four clear demands in the letter, including asking Google to immediately stop infringement and stop using Disney IP for AI model training. It also pointed out that Disney has expressed concerns on related issues many times before, but Google has not made significant improvements.
In response to Disney's infringement accusations, a Google spokesperson responded after the letter was exposed, saying that Google and Disney have maintained a long-term mutually beneficial cooperative relationship and will continue to communicate on this issue in the future. The spokesperson said that Google uses public data from the open network to train AI, and has also launched Google-extended, YouTube Content ID and other copyright control mechanisms to provide websites and copyright owners with corresponding rights for content management.
It is worth noting that while defending rights against Google, there is also new news about the cooperation between Disney and OpenAI. The two parties have announced an agreement worth US$1 billion, and Disney will license its characters to OpenAI’s generative video application Sora.