In the midst of an ongoing legal battle with three major Hollywood studios, the AI company Midjourney is pushing to force these studios to disclose how they themselves are using artificial intelligence. Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit against Midjourney last year, accusing the startup of copyright infringement. They pointed out that the company’s image-generation tools could produce pictures of iconic characters like Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, both owned by the studios. Warner Bros. later joined the lawsuit as well. Midjourney contends that training its AI on images of copyrighted characters is allowed under fair use. The current disagreement centers on what documents the studios must hand over during the discovery phase. A judge previously ruled that the studios do have to share information about their generative AI activities—but only when those activities result in “consumer-facing” videos and images. In its latest legal filing, Midjourney is trying to overturn that restriction, arguing that it “unfairly” lets the studios “cherry-pick only those documents they believe support their market harm claims while depriving Midjourney of documents that would support its defenses.”

Midjourney further claims that “the documents [the studios] are withholding are precisely those that would reveal whether, behind closed doors, they are doing exactly what they are suing Midjourney for doing.” For instance, the startup argues that if the studios are building image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboarding or ideating content for film or TV, that evidence would equally demonstrate that it is an industry custom, even among the studios themselves, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted content.”

In the same filing, Midjourney also demands that the studios disclose every prompt they’ve used in Midjourney, along with all resulting outputs—not just the prompts that produced allegedly infringing images. The studios’ lead attorney, David Singer, previously dismissed this request as part of a “fishing expedition.” He also stated that the studios “do not seek to stop AI technology or even shut down Midjourney’s business,” but rather “simply want Midjourney to stop copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly displaying, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that include copies of [their] famous characters without authorization.”