Is Elon Musk A Replicant?

Musk Sued For Crappy AI Plagiarism At Conference Celebrating His Brilliant Innovations

On the afternoon of October 10, 2024, just hours before an event to hype its “fully autonomous cybercab,” Tesla realized it had a problem. The company had acquired what it believed to be the rights to use a still image from the 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 from Warner Bros. Discovery Inc (WBDI) in its promotion. It had rented out Warner Bros.’ studio lot in Burbank, California and invited various luminaries to witness the beautiful future — always right around the corner — of self-driving cars. But at 2 pm, WBDI realized that it did not own the rights to the image, and the actual owner, Alcon Entertainment, refused to associate itself with Musk and his companies.

And so, according to a complaint filed last week, Musk’s minions used AI to generate a copycat image and proceeded as planned. Because if you can’t beat ‘em, get your plagiarism bot to steal ‘em, right?

Mistakes Were Made

In 1982, Warner Bros. released the original Blade Runner movie, adapted from the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? by science fiction author Philip K. Dick. It was an instant classic, launching a franchise exploring the fraught line separating humans from machines. The iconic shot at issue from the sequel featured actor Ryan Gosling, portraying a replicant android sent to hunt down a child born to a replicant mother, something which would offend both law and the natural order in the Blade Runner cinematic universe. He’s pictured in a duster jacket, next to his autonomous flying car, known as a “spinner,” outside a post-apocalyptic Las Vegas, rendered uninhabitable by a nuclear bomb. The still was featured in publicity for the movie and is instantly recognizable to sci-fi fans.

It’s not hard to guess why Musk wanted to license it, particularly when the copy of his presentation promised to deliver the fantastical, sentient vehicles of the future, without the unpleasant mess of an apocalypse. And it’s not hard to see why WBDI would be eager to give it to him, since, according to the complaint, Tesla would have had to rent the lot out for weeks in advance to train the “autonomous” cybercabs at a cost in the neighborhood of a million dollars. But it appears that WBDI did not have the license to give.

In 2011, film studio Alcon Entertainment, LLC acquired virtually all of the intellectual property associated with the Blade Runner franchise from Warner Bros. Alcon went on to develop Blade Runner 2049, mobile, PC, and virtual reality video games set in the Blade Runner universe, an anime series called Blade Runner: Black Lotus, and the forthcoming streaming series Blade Runner 2099, which is set to debut on Amazon Prime early next year.

According to the complaint:

Warner Bros. Pictures was Alcon’s domestic distributor for the 2017 theatrical release of BR2049 and still has some domestic distribution rights, but not without limitations and restrictions. Warner Bros. Pictures has some limited and ongoing “clip licensing” rights in the domestic market only, and not at all for a livestream television feed. Moreover, neither Warner Bros. Pictures nor any other WBDI entity owns the copyright in BR2049 or any of the Picture’s marks or goodwill. No WBDI entity has or ever had any non-domestic rights or permissions for the Picture. Thus, neither Warner Bros. Pictures nor any other WBDI entity has or ever had sufficient rights to allow Tesla to exploit BR2049 or any of its elements, marks or goodwill in connection with the globally livestreamed cybercab reveal event.

On the afternoon of the event, it appears to have occurred to WBDI’s IP team that they had granted a “clip license” for what was essentially a brand affiliation, and they frantically reached out to Alcon to correct the discrepancy. But Alcon’s management thought about it for about five seconds before concluding that they absolutely “did not want BR2049 to be affiliated with Musk, Tesla, or any Musk company,” at a moment when the billionaire is spewing racist propaganda and making his brand synonymous with Trump’s MAGA coalition:

Any prudent brand considering any Tesla partnership has to take Musk’s massively amplified, highly politicized, capricious and arbitrary behavior, which sometimes veers into hate speech, into account. If, as here, a company or its principals do not actually agree with Musk’s extreme political and social views, then a potential brand affiliation with Tesla is even more issue-fraught.

Alcon told WBDI in no uncertain terms that it refused to license the image to Tesla for the promotion, which was by then less than six hours away.

And so Tesla ran with … this.

I Think We All Grok What Happened Here

There’s a distinctive shittiness to AI art that makes it instantly recognizable. It’s definitionally derivative, “training” on images and text harvested largely without the consent of their creators, and spitting out hyper-pigmented forgeries that are perceptibly off. If you zoomed in, the Gosling lookalike would almost certainly have six fingers on each hand.

The complaint alleges that someone at Tesla fed the original still and perhaps the associated footage into an AI image generator, and then substituted the new, copied image in that evening’s presentation. And Musk’s speech certainly suggests that he intended to associate Tesla with the Blade Runner franchise.

He opened by saying, “So you see a lot of sci-fi movies where the future is dark and dismal, where it’s not a future you want to be in.” Then the “Shitty Gosling” image filled the screen for eleven seconds, while Musk said, “You know, I love ‘Blade Runner,’ but I don’t know if we want that future. I believe we want that duster he’s wearing, but not the, uh, not the bleak apocalypse.” After which he explained to the audience how cities filled with autonomous cars would be amazing and not at all apocalyptic.

Alcon accuses Musk of associating Tesla’s battered brand with a beloved movie franchise, and implicitly with Hollywood itself:

The [Warner Bros.] lot location, and especially the strained science fiction film references, were all clearly an intentional effort to affiliate Tesla and its cybercab with Hollywood brands, and at a time when Musk and Tesla are on the outs with Hollywood creatives and brands.  It was all about appropriating desirable Hollywood associations, and if possible, Hollywood associations with special resonance to artificial intelligence and strikingly-designed autonomous cars. …  [Blade Runner 2049 has] massive consumer goodwill specifically around really cool-looking artificially intelligent, autonomous cars. … It was the best and most specifically relevant film brand for Tesla to appropriate, or one of the best. … [A]nd when Alcon did not give it to them, they stole it.

And so the company sued, alleging three violations of the Copyright Act of 1976 and a claim for false endorsement under the Lanham Act.

Amateurs Borrow, Professionals Steal

John Lennon said that, although he was stealing from T.S. Eliot when he did so. So did Pablo Picasso, apparently.

Of course, Lennon didn’t mean it literally, or else his estate wouldn’t have sued the producers of the creationist propaganda film “EXPELLED” in 2008 for using fifteen seconds of “Imagine” without permission.

This tension as to what it means to steal is reflected in American copyright law, which protects “original works of authorship.” Copyright law is sometimes described as a bundle of sticks, with each stick representing a different right owned by the original creator. One such stick is the right to control, distribute (and sell) all copies of that work. That prevents someone else from directly copying a work of art and passing it off as their own.

Copyright law also protects the artist from more than just outright plagiarism. An additional stick in the bundle is the right of the original artist to create derivative works, defined in Section 101 of the Copyright Act of 1976 as:

A work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted.

When Dick wrote Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, he gained not only the right to sell that novel, but the right to all of the copyrightable elements in it as well, such as the character of Rick Deckard, as well as the right to create a movie adaptation or otherwise to transform or adapt the story, such as by creating prequels or sequels. Eventually, Dick would sell some of those rights to movie producer Herb Jaffe. That led to Blade Runner, which in turn led to all of the Blade Runner derivative properties.

What Dick didn’t own, however, was any sort of copyright in the ideas expressed in Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, such as the concept of a dystopian future, or the philosophical question of what it means to be human. Those ideas are the things that Lennon, Eliot, and Picasso were saying that it’s okay to steal, even if the line is sometimes difficult to draw.

But wherever that line is, what Musk is alleged to have done was way over it.

Asimov vs. Dick

The Tesla event leaned hard into the science fiction theme. Musk called the shindig “We, Robot,” after Isaac Asimov’s short story I, Robot. The party featured “robot” bartenders, who turned out to be more “Mechanical Turk” than C-3P0.

In some sense, science fiction both predicts and shapes the future. We develop a cultural understanding of what the future looks like, and innovators signal to us that their products are “futuristic” by meeting those expectations. That’s why the cybertruck looks like it was drawn by a 14-year-old math nerd in 1997 — it’s the physical instantiation of what we thought future cars would be, brought to life by a maniac so unburdened by safety and design standards that he could simply ban the color yellow.

The idea of self-driving cars has been a staple of science fiction for at least seventy years, which is perhaps why the science fiction filmmaker behind the movie adaptation of I, Robot tweeted out this joke, rather than actually suing Musk for copying his designs.

And it’s why Musk calling the event “We, Robot” wasn’t copyright infringement, even though the I, Robot series is protected by copyright and the earliest story will not enter the public domain for at least another three decades. Musk did not (and did not have to) seek permission from Asimov’s estate, since Asimov didn’t invent the concept of a robot, and wouldn’t own it even if he had.

Had that been all Musk did, everything would have been fine. Musk was perfectly free to stage a PR event suggesting that his company was ushering in an Isaac Asimov future rather than a Philip K. Dick one.

But what Musk did during the voiceover was more than just appropriate the idea of a post-apocalyptic future landscape populated by augmented humans and their self-driving cars. Instead, he appropriated a distinctive and copyrightable image: “a silhouetted trench coat-wearing man moving through a misty orange-colored ruinous urban desert landscape,” used frequently by Alcon in promoting Blade Runner 2049 and its associated properties. And he did so on the Warner Bros. lot. It wasn’t subtle.

But there is one wrinkle ...

Apocalypse vs. Dystopia

Alcon’s 2011 deal with Warner had one important carve-out: While Alcon would acquire virtually all of the Blade Runner intellectual property, including the right to make sequels or spinoffs, Warner Brothers would retain the rights to create any Blade Runner reboot or “remake of the original.” (The exact terms of the deal are not public.)

In practical terms, that means that if Tesla ripped off the original 1982 Blade Runner rather than Blade Runner 2049, that copyright belongs to Warner Brothers and not Alcon, and this lawsuit goes away. Tesla will surely argue that’s the case, and they’ll point to Musk’s words — he said “Blade Runner” and not “Blade Runner 2049!” — as well as to the fact that many of the same science fiction ideas are present in both movies.

There’s just one problem: Musk’s reference to Blade Runner at the “We, Robot” event described a “bleak apocalypse.” But the original film was not set in a post-apocalyptic, orange-hued urban ruin. Instead, it was set in what people in 1982 thought Los Angeles would look like in 2019.

Blade Runner is a dystopia, but a very specific one: It’s an over-commercialized, over-populated, economically stratified “neon urban prison” (to use Alcon’s words) in which the ultra-wealthy and those in positions of power get cool flying cars, while the rest of us get bombarded with non-stop advertising. (Perhaps those 1982 folks didn’t get everything wrong about the future.)

Bottom line: Blade Runner isn’t an apocalypse, and it’s fictionalized vision of 2019 wasn’t the “NOT THIS” Elon was referencing. And so what Musk had an AI create wasn’t derivative of the original film; it was derivative of Blade Runner 2049’s different, apocalyptic future.

Or, if that’s too difficult to explain in court, Alcon can always fall back on: Blade Runner is blue. Blade Runner 2049 is orange.

Oh the Irony!

Musk is a great fan of science fiction. In fact, he named his own AI “Grok,” the Martian word for knowledge and deep understanding from Robert Heinlein’s 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. But it’s not clear that Musk actually groks the genre at all.

Because of course large language models like Grok do not understand the data they consume at enormous environmental cost to the planet. And Musk, whose Neuralink company wants to put chips in everyone’s brain to make us better, seems not to have understood that the Blade Runner movies are about the danger of failing to observe the essence of what makes us human. So perhaps he simply failed to grasp that just saying Blade Runner (as opposed to specifying Blade Runner 2049) would not save him from his little licensing problem. Particularly since the original movie wasn’t about a post-apocalyptic Earth, but rather one ruined by out-of-control income inequality and hoarding of resources to power innovations which only benefit the rich. And now he’s getting sued for using a computer to fake human-generated art cribbed from a movie about machines impersonating humans.

Truth really is stranger than fiction.