The battle over the future of AI-generated content escalated on Wednesday as two Hollywood titans sued a fast-growing AI start-up for copyright infringement.

Disney and NBCUniversal sued an artificial intelligence developer for allegedly infringing on their protected works, the first Hollywood corporate titans to join a mushrooming legal war pitting copyright holders against AI upstarts.

AI advocates have been trying to handwave around this notion from the outset, but at some point a court is going to have to sit down and confront the fact that the precision with which these systems can replicate copyrighted characters, scenes, and other materials requires that they must have stored that infringing material in some form.

Disney and Universal’s lawsuit frames the issue as a matter ... are already using AI for preproduction brainstorming, special effects and on-screen images. The quality of AI-generated content ...