Blade Runner producer sues Elon Musk for using his images in the ‘robotaxi’ presentation

The producer of the movie ‘Blade Runner 2049’ has sued businessman Elon Musk for illegally using images from the science-fiction film to promote Tesla’s new ‘robotaxi’, a company of which he is the largest shareholder and executive director.

Alcon Entertainment filed the lawsuit in federal court in California, accusing Elon Musk and his electric car company of misappropriating the film’s trademark to promote his self-driving car at a presentation this month in Los Angeles.

The lawsuit also names Warner Bros. and Discovery as defendants, and says that Alcon had rejected a request from Musk and these companies to use footage from ‘Blade Runner 2049’ as part of an Oct. 10 marketing event at the studio. from Warner. According to the complaint, the alleged use of the images of the autonomous car took place at that event, even though their use had been denied by the production company.

Using AI to recreate scenes from the movie

The presentation stopped short of using exact images from the film directed by Denis Villeneuve, but showed “images created by artificial intelligence (AI) that reflected scenes” from the Oscar-winning film for best visual effects and photography, according to the lawsuit. .

He calls the use of AI tools to create nearly identical images “a bad faith and intentionally malicious tactic” with the goal of making the event “more attractive to a global audience (…) to help sell Teslas.”

Alcon Entertainment had rejected a request from Musk for the use of footage from the film due to his “highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which at times descends into hate speech,” according to the complaint.

The production company also noted that it was in talks with other automotive brands to partner on an upcoming Amazon television series, ‘Blade Runner 2099’, and that it did not want anything to interfere with those negotiations, The New York Times reported.

‘Blade Runner 2049’, a sequel to ‘Blade Runner’ (1982), was financed and produced by Alcon and released by Warner Bros. in 2017. The film stars replicant K (Ryan Gosling), a human-like android who lives in a post-apocalyptic America and drives a fully autonomous, artificially intelligent car.