Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and Universal Pictures have sued a Chinese artificial intelligence image and video generator for copyright infringement, opening another front in a high-stakes battle involving the use of movies and TV shows owned by major studios to teach AI systems.

The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in California federal court, accuses MiniMax of building its business by plundering the studios’ intellectual property. Its service, Hailuo AI, allows users to generate content of iconic copyrighted characters.

The studios characterize MiniMax’s alleged infringement as an existential threat. Given the rapid advancement of AI technology, it’s “only a matter of time until Hailuo AI can generate unauthorized, infringing videos” that are “substantially longer, and even eventually the same duration as a movie or television program,” the lawsuit says.

For years, AI companies have been training their technology on data scraped across the internet without compensating creators. It’s led to lawsuits from authors, record labels, news organizations, artists and studios, which contend that some AI tools erode demand for their content.

Earlier this month, Warner Bros. Discovery joined Disney and Universal in suing Midjourney for allegedly training its AI system on its movies and TV shows. By their thinking, the AI company is a free-rider plagiarizing their content.

In a statement, Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin said AI companies will be “held accountable for infringing on the rights of American creators wherever they are located.” He added, “We remain concerned that copyright infringement, left unchecked, threatens the entire American motion picture industry.”

MiniMax markets its Hailuo AI as a “Hollywood studio in your pocket” and uses studios’ characters in promotional materials, the lawsuit says.

When prompted with Darth Vader, the service returns an image of the character with a Minimax watermark, according to the complaint. It can also generate videos of characters seen across Disney, Warner Bros. and Universal movies and TV shows, including Minions, Guardians of the Galaxy and Superman, the lawsuit claims. 

The only way MiniMax’s technology would be able do so, the studios allege, is if the company trained its AI system on their intellectual property.

The lawsuit seeks unspecified damages, including disgorgement of profits, and a court order barring MiniMax from continuing to exploit studios’ works.

It has never been easier to make a website or graphic with AI tools, but Jorn van Dijk, the cofounder of AI website builder Framer, says designers still need to put in some grunt work to stand out in the field.

Van Dijk told Business Insider that designers must nurture their sense of taste as they develop their careers.

“Taste and quality go hand in hand. With AI, it’s super easy to make something sloppy very fast. That’s why it’s called AI slop,” he said.

“A way to stand out is to focus on quality and making something unique to yourself, to the individual, and to the brand,” he added.

This is critical for businesses, which rely on their designers to develop a brand that “people like to engage with and get excited about,” van Dijk said.

“That is increasingly hard and not easy to do,” he said.

To refine one’s taste, van Dijk said designers should go back to the basics and “hone your hard skills.” That involves getting practice with tools to create good design and producing more work.

“Do a lot of exploration, make a lot of mock-ups, make a lot of icons, draw a lot of logos,” van Dijk said.

“What worked 10 years ago is probably still true today. It’s just that the tools have changed, and we can leverage AI to do better work,” he added.

Van Dijk started Framer in 2014 with his cofounder, Koen Bok. The company has over 130 employees and is based in Amsterdam, per PitchBook. In August, Framer raised $100 million at a $2 billion valuation in its Series D funding round.

Van Dijk and Bok cofounded Sofa in 2006, a software company that made apps for Apple’s MacBooks. Meta acquired Sofa in 2011, and the pair worked as product designers at the social media giant between 2011 and 2013.

Van Dijk told Business Insider that AI can benefit many creative fields, such as graphic design and film, but it hasn’t leveled the playing field between professional artists and the average person.

“It’s never been easier to create good video, but I haven’t really seen the amount of amazing videos or ads skyrocket because of that,” he said.

MEDIA

President Trump has added The New York Times to the list of media companies he’s challenged in court, filing a $15 billion defamation lawsuit that targets four of its journalists in a book and three articles published within a two-month period before the last election. In a Truth Social post announcing the lawsuit early Tuesday, Trump called the Times “one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the nation’s history” and a virtual mouthpiece for Democrats. The lawsuit was filed in US District Court in Florida. The Times called the lawsuit meritless and an attempt to discourage independent reporting. “The New York Times will not be deterred by intimidation tactics,” spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

RETAIL

Target is expanding its next-day delivery of parcel shipments to 35 of the nation’s top 60 metropolitan markets by the end of next month, marking 22 new cities this year, as the discount retailer aims to narrow the gap with the likes of Amazon. That means that its next-day delivery expansion will go to 54 percent of the US population, up from 20 percent, according to Gretchen McCarthy, Target’s chief supply chain and logistics officer. San Diego and Orlando and Tampa, Fla., are on the list. Target plans to add another 20 cities for next-day delivery by next year, the company said. Target said it offers same-day delivery to more than 80 percent of the US population, through Shipt, a delivery subscription service that Target acquired in 2017. In comparison, online behemoth Amazon expanded the number of same-day delivery sites by more than 60 percent in 2024 for its Amazon Prime members and serves more than 140 metro areas. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

SPENDING

Shoppers increased their spending at a better-than-expected pace in August from July, helped by back-to-school shopping, even as President Trump’s tariffs start to hurt the job market and lead to price increases. Retail sales rose 0.6 percent last month from July, when sales were up a revised 0.6 percent, according to the Commerce Department’s report. In June, retail sales rose 0.9 percent, the government agency said. The August performance, announced Tuesday, was also likely helped by the continued efforts by Americans to keep pushing up purchases ahead of expected price increases. The sales increases followed two straight months of spending declines in April and May. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

PHARMA

For the first time, federal health officials are taking aim at telehealth companies promoting unofficial versions of prescription drugs, including popular weight loss medications, as part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on pharmaceutical advertising. The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday posted more than 100 letters to various drugmakers and online prescribing companies, including Hims & Hers, which has built a multibillion-dollar business centered around lower-cost versions of blockbuster obesity injections. The FDA warned the company to remove “false and misleading” promotional statements from its website, including language claiming that its customized products contain “the same active ingredient” as FDA-approved drugs Wegovy and Ozempic. The formulations cited by regulators are produced by specialty compounding pharmacies and aren’t reviewed by the FDA. “Your claims imply that your products are the same as an FDA-approved product when they are not,” states the warning letter, dated Sept. 9. Hims said Tuesday that it “looks forward to engaging with the FDA.” “Our website and our customer-facing materials note that compounded treatments are not approved or evaluated by the FDA,” the company said in a statement. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

TECH

President Trump on Tuesday extended for the fourth time the deadline for when TikTok had to be separated from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or face a ban in the United States. The extension could be Trump’s last for the video app. He and other officials said this week that they had reached a framework for a deal with China to address national security concerns about ByteDance and its ties to Beijing. “We have a deal on TikTok,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it.” He is set to speak Friday with China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, to “confirm everything up,” he said. No officials have disclosed any details of the framework. The latest extension gives negotiators until Dec. 16 to find a new owner for TikTok. — NEW YORK TIMES

AVIATION

United Airlines says its Newark, N.J., hub is no longer in crisis mode. After a series of harrowing incidents this spring, flight delays are back to normal and passengers are once again using Newark Liberty International Airport in roughly the same numbers as before the problems emerged, United said Tuesday. Newark, one of the New York area’s three main airports, struggled this spring when runway construction and air traffic control technology outages and staffing shortages caused acute delays in flights, frustrating passengers and raising concerns about the broader aviation system. On one particularly bad day in April, traffic controllers briefly lost radar and radio contact with planes at Newark. The problems drove many people to avoid the airport, and United told investors that its Newark flights were about 15 percent less full after the disruptions peaked. But the end of most runway construction work in June and limits on the number of flights there, imposed by federal regulators, have stabilized the airport, according to United, which operates a large majority of the flights at Newark. — NEW YORK TIMES

Boeing Co.’s striking defense workers will vote Friday on a contract proposal drafted by union leaders that includes a 20 percent guaranteed wage increase and $10,000 signing bonus aimed at ending a six-week labor standoff. The planemaker criticized the novel union maneuver and its revised contract terms, which were made without management’s input. Both will prolong a strike that has already cost factory workers $15,000 in lost income, on average, Boeing said. The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 837 described their proposed four-year agreement as an improvement on the company’s overtures that the union rejected last week. The union is seeking to break an impasse after Boeing refused to sweeten its latest offer, a five-year contract that would have provided an average 24 percent guaranteed wage increase and $4,000 bonus. It was the third management offer to be voted down by the 3,200-member union, which has been on strike since Aug. 4. If the union proposal is approved by a majority of members, the offer will be submitted to management as a “pre-ratified agreement subject to Boeing’s acceptance,” IAM said. — BLOOMBERG NEWS