The Dope Sheet - June 13, 2025
This week in animated AI news
Here’s the latest news at the frontlines of AI & Animation. This Friday the 13th, it’s bad luck for Midjourney as Disney and Universal sue the tech startup for copyright infringement, and the anti-AI protests hit Annecy.
Let’s get into it.
Legal
In what is sure to be a landmark court case, Disney and Universal have teamed up to sue generative image tech firm Midjourney. It’s worth reading the court filing here to check out the wealth of compelling evidence. Of note is that Disney and Universal aren’t suing over the training data, but rather the fact that Midjourney outputs characters from Disney and Universal films. (via The New York Times)
Tools
In contrast, the Chinese AI video generation model Vidu has announced a licensing deal with the rights holders of the anime Into the West, allowing the tech company to output videos in the style of the classic show. A very different approach from the unauthorized Ghibli trend from OpenAI a couple of months back. It’s important to note that this only solves the output problem, not the copyright issues involved in training the model. (via Deadline)
Toon Boom has released a suite of AI tools called Ember to work with Harmony and Storyboard Pro. Some tools like the automatic script breakdown and scratch track creation in Storyboard Pro don’t seem like they’ll be very useful, but I could see the upscaling, masking, and BG extension getting some traction (Although I’m sure some art directors won’t be thrilled to have AI add to their background paintings) (via Toon Boom)
Labour
As I reported last week, an anti-AI demonstration descended on the Annecy Animation Festival on Thursday. It was a modest showing (Deadline reports about 150 people in attendance), but it proves the issue of AI and artists’ rights isn’t going away. (via Deadline)
In other labour news, after nearly a year on the picket line, American actors’ union SAG-AFTRA has reached a tentative agreement between video game producers and performers. The central issue here (surprise, surprise) was AI protections for video game performers. (via IGN)
Industry
The British Film Institute released a forward-looking report on AI in the British film industry, offering nine recommendations. Among the recommendations was to support initiatives like the Charismatic Consortium backed by Aardman Animation, that brings AI tools to “under-represented content creators and established producers to enhance storytelling in film and television.” (via The Hollywood Reporter)
Medicine
Finally, in the most out-of-left-field news of the week, researchers at Harvard have used Hollywood procedural animation techniques paired with a sophisticated AI model to develop a new drug for coronaviruses with very promising results. This proves once again that the story of animation + AI is nothing if not surprising. (via Harvard)
Seeya next time,
Matt Ferg.