The Hollywood company behind “Blade Runner 2049” sued Elon Musk for copyright infringement on Monday, accusing him of illegally using imagery from that film to promote Tesla’s new “robotaxi.”
Alcon Entertainment, a movie and television company backed by the FedEx founder Frederick W. Smith, filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles. The complaint also names Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery as defendants, saying that Alcon had denied a request by Mr. Musk and the companies to use imagery from “Blade Runner 2049” as part of an Oct. 10 marketing event on the Warner lot.
“He did it anyway,” the suit says.
Mr. Musk’s live-streamed presentation — a grand unveiling of a car that Tesla says will be able to drive itself — did not use exact “Blade Runner 2049” images, according to the complaint. Rather, the event showcased “A.I.-created images mirroring scenes from ‘Blade Runner 2049,’ including one featuring a Ryan Gosling look-alike,” Alcon said.
The lawsuit called the use of artificial intelligence tools to create near-identical images “a bad-faith and intentionally malicious gambit” to make the event “more attractive to a global audience and to misappropriate the ‘Blade Runner 2049’ brand to help sell Teslas.”
Mr. Musk, Tesla and Warner Bros. Discovery could not immediately be reached for comment.
As described by Alcon, the episode bears a striking resemblance to one earlier this year involving the actress Scarlett Johansson and the artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI. Days before it demonstrated a new virtual assistant, OpenAI had requested that Ms. Johansson license her voice for it. She declined.
Despite her refusal, OpenAI used a voice called “Sky” that sounded “eerily similar to mine,” Ms. Johansson said at the time, noting that she had hired a lawyer. OpenAI denied that it had intended to copy her voice, but pulled “Sky” as a voice option, saying in a blog post that “A.I. voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice.”
“Blade Runner 2049,” a sequel, was financed and produced by Alcon and released by Warner Bros. in 2017. The movie stars Mr. Gosling as a bioengineered human living in a postapocalyptic America and prominently features an artificially intelligent, fully autonomous car.
Alcon denied a request to allow Mr. Musk to use imagery from the film because of his “highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech,” according to the complaint. Alcon also said it was in talks with other automotive brands for partnerships on an upcoming Amazon television series, “Blade Runner 2099,” and didn’t want to derail those negotiations.
Now, Alcon said in its suit, “the false affiliation between ‘Blade Runner 2049’ and Tesla has been irreparably tangled in the global media tapestry, as all defendants knew would inevitably happen.”
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