In the midst of a continuing legal battle with three Hollywood studios, AI company Midjourney is aiming to require those studios to disclose their own AI usage.

Last year, Disney and Universal filed suit against Midjourney for purported copyright violations, indicating that the startup’s image-generation technology could produce images of characters like Bart Simpson and Darth Vader, owned by the studios. A few months later, Warner Bros. also initiated legal action against Midjourney.

The startup contends that utilizing images of copyrighted characters to train its AI models falls under fair use.

The ongoing controversy centers on the documents the studios must generate during the discovery stage. An earlier ruling determined that the studios must indeed share information about their usage of generative AI – but only when it relates to “consumer-facing” videos and images.

In its recent submission, Midjourney aims to lift that restriction, asserting that it “unjustly” permits the studios “to selectively provide only those documents they think bolster their claims of market harm while denying Midjourney access to documents that could support its defenses.”

Midjourney further asserts that the “documents [the studios] are holding back are exactly those that would disclose whether, behind closed doors, they are engaging in the same practices they are suing Midjourney for.”

For instance, the startup mentions that if the studios are creating image-generating AI models “for internal use in storyboarding or content brainstorming for film or TV, that proof would equally indicate that it is a standard practice, even among the studios, to download and train AI on unlicensed copyrighted material.”

Within the filing, the startup also contends that the studios ought to disclose all prompts they utilized in Midjourney, along with the outputs generated, not merely the prompts that resulted in the supposedly infringing images.

The lead attorney for the studios, David Singer, previously asserted that Midjourney was pursuing this documentation as part of a “fishing expedition.”

He also remarked that the studios “do not aim to halt AI technology or even close down Midjourney’s operations,” but rather “merely wish for Midjourney to cease copying their movies and TV shows and to stop distributing, publicly exhibiting, publicly performing, and creating derivative works that feature copies of [their] iconic characters without permission.”