Alcon Entertainment is suing the world's richest man, Elon Musk, his company, Tesla, and Warner Bros Discovery for purportedly using imagery from its movie, Blade Runner 2049.
Court documents obtained by the BBC reveal that the dispute stems from Alcon's refusal to grant Musk and Tesla "all permissions" to use imagery from Blade Runner 2049, for the launch of the Tesla Robotaxi.
The production company then accused the parties in question of feeding an AI generator imagery from the movie to create AI-generated replacements. "Defendants then used an apparently AI-generated faked image to do it all anyway."
Both the supposed AI-generated imagery in question and stills from the Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling-fronted movie depict orange-hued dystopias. The former was displayed during Musk's presentation at the Tesla Robotaxi Unveil presentation event at Warner Bros Studios, California (below).
During the presentation Musk states: "I love Blade Runner, but I dunno if we want that future," while the image in question is displayed.
Incidentally, Warner Bros distributed Blade Runner 2049 in North America, during its release in 2017.
The lawsuit also makes it clear that Alcon Entertainment does not want the Blade Runner franchise to be associated with Telsa, stating: "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."
The dispute comes as Alcon is gearing up for the release of Amazon Prime miniseries, Blade Runner 2099, which is currently projected to stream sometime next year. The show will be a sequel to Blade Runner 2049, further expanding the Blade Runner universe inspired by Philip K Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968).
The lawsuit joins a growing number of AI-related concerns and disputes within the creative industry, due to the rapid advancement of AI tech in recent years. Just last week it was reported that the AI camera market is set to reach a staggering $33.5 billion in the next 10 years.
If you're interested in artificial intelligence, take a look at the best AI image generators and if you're a filmmaking buff, check out the best cameras for filmmaking.
