Elon Musk may have personally used AI to rip off a Blade Runner 2049 image for a Tesla cybercab event after producers rejected any association between their iconic sci-fi movie and Musk or any of his companies.
In a lawsuit filed Tuesday, lawyers for Alcon Entertainment—exclusive rightsholder of the 2017 Blade Runner 2049 movie—accused Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) of conspiring with Musk and Tesla to steal the image and infringe Alcon’s copyright to benefit financially off the brand association.
Alcon said it would never allow Tesla to exploit its Blade Runner film, so “although the information given was sparse, Alcon learned enough information for Alcon’s co-CEOs to consider the proposal and firmly reject it, which they did.” Specifically, Alcon denied any affiliation—express or implied—between Tesla’s cybercab and Blade Runner 2049.
“Musk has become an increasingly vocal, overtly political, highly polarizing figure globally, and especially in Hollywood,” Alcon’s complaint said. If Hollywood perceived an affiliation with Musk and Tesla, the complaint said, the company risked alienating not just other car brands currently weighing partnerships on the Blade Runner 2099 TV series Alcon has in the works, but also potentially losing access to top Hollywood talent for their films.
The “Hollywood talent pool market generally is less likely to deal with Alcon, or parts of the market may be, if they believe or are confused as to whether, Alcon has an affiliation with Tesla or Musk,” the complaint said.
Musk, the lawsuit said, is “problematic,” and “any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account.”
If Tesla and WBD are found to have violated copyright and false representation laws, that potentially puts both companies on the hook for damages that cover not just copyright fines but also Alcon’s lost profits and reputation damage after the alleged “massive economic theft.”
I really like there is now a legal definition Alcon has put together that any association of Musk with a brand is a risk to the brand.
If there were any doubts that this image was supposed to reference the Blade Runner movie, the lawsuit said, Musk “erased them” by directly referencing the movie in his comments.
“You know, I love Blade Runner, but I don’t know if we want that future,” Musk said at the event. "I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.”
…
But producers argued that defense is “not credible” since Tesla explicitly asked to use the Blade Runner 2049 image, and there are “better” films in WBD’s library to promote Musk’s message, like the Mad Max movies.
Damn they clapped him hard on that last one
According to the complaint,
Elon Musk’s image:
Infringes on the copyright of this image from Blade Runner 2049:
The producers think the image was likely generated—“even possibly by Musk himself”—by “asking an AI image generation engine to make ‘an image from the K surveying ruined Las Vegas sequence of Blade Runner 2049,’ or some closely equivalent input direction,” the lawsuit said.
In my opinion, I hope that this lawsuit fails. I know that the movie industry already follows similar practices to what Musk has done. If a studio goes to a certain musician and the price is too high to include their music in the show, they’ll go to a different artist and ask them to create a song that sounds like the song that they originally wanted.
If this lawsuit succeeds it’s going to open the door for them to sue anyone that makes art that’s remotely close to their copyrighted work. All they will need to do is claim that it “might have been created by AI with a prompt specifying our work” without actually having to have any proof beforehand.
I’m terrified how fear of AI is suddenly making tighter copyright laws more popular.
Yeah, don’t know what to think. Is this closer to copying a melody from a certain ballad or using the same chords that no-one owns and have been reused through decades to write a ballad… 🤔
It’s one thing to just do a similar melody by accident, and entirely another to ask the artist if you could use the melody, get explicitly denied, then go on and use that melody anyway, changing a single less relevant note in there.
I think everyone gets this distinction innately, we just get caught up in the copyright law aspect of this, which I’m not claiming isn’t relevant. It’s just Musk being a clear scumbag, whichever way you lean on the lawfulness side of it.
Edit: What I mean to say is, it’s fairly clearly morally corrupted and wrong, but it’s not so immediately clear to accept as such in this reality, where declaring so might have consequences beyond this instance.
If it wasn’t clear from my comment, I’m not defending Musk. Don’t care much about him.
I just don’t envy the judge that has to consider this. I’m a musician, and find it complicated to judge such issues in the musical landscape.
Was replying more in the general, not specifically to you, but yeah. I’m a musician too myself, and have a wide range of other creatives in my inner circle, and this whole copyright topic is extremely hard. But I think we mostly can ignore that aspect when we consider the moral side as-is. A lot less complicated that way. Again, more in the general sense for all the comments in this post, sorry to drop it all here.
No worries. Thanks for your input. 🍻
I don’t get your comment, first it’s an argument that says, others are doing fucked up wrong things, therefore Elon is justified doing it too.
In the second paragraph you fear monger that anyone who creates anything remotely similar will be sued with no proof , but this case literally spells out that Elon first asked for the image, then used one similar anyway when denied, then mentioned the source in question twice in his speech.
It’s literally nothing like the thing you fearmonger about, how your comment got 17 upvotes is beyond me.
A man of this wealth and status childishly saying that 2049 sucks is cherry on top of my radicalization cake
I still hold 2049 as one of my best cinema-experiences of the last decade.
It’s easily one of my favorite movies, and I think the characters and themes of 2049 stay truer to the book than the original bladerunner even though the plot changed.
