Characters from The Office — Dwight, Jim, and the rest of the Scranton crew — have surfaced in AI-generated bootleg videos produced by MiniMax's Hailuo 3 model, a video generator developed in China that is not directly available to users in the United States or the European Union but has spread virally through third-party access, according to Deadline's Rendering column. Deadline

Justine Moore, a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, generated a clip of Dwight and Jim using a text prompt typed into Krea — an online studio that lets users route requests through several generative AI models. Her prompt was processed on MiniMax's servers, and the resulting footage circulated widely online. Deadline

MiniMax is already fighting a copyright lawsuit brought by Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. In that suit, filed in 2025, the studios allege that Hailuo "pirates and plunders copyrighted works on a massive scale" and describe the service as a threat to the American movie industry and the millions of people it employs. Courthouse News

The studios pointed to MiniMax's own YouTube account, where the company had promoted Hailuo using AI videos of Deadpool, Wolverine, and the Joker — characters owned by the very companies suing it. Those clips have since been scrubbed from the channel. Deadline

A MiniMax representative told Deadline that the full H3 model would not be made available in the U.S. because of "ongoing copyright-related legal proceedings specifically concerning generative video AI." The model nonetheless reaches Western users through platforms like Krea that pipe requests through MiniMax's infrastructure. Deadline

The Office bootlegs are part of a broader pattern. VN.ai, a startup that stress-tests generative AI tools for copyright infringement, produced bootleg images of Elsa from Frozen, Shrek, and Buzz Lightyear using ByteDance's Seedream 5.0 image creator — another Chinese model whose outputs flagrantly reproduce well-known Hollywood characters. Deadline

ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, has run into similar trouble with its own video generator. In February 2026, ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 produced a widely viral deepfake fight scene pitting Tom Cruise against Brad Pitt. Netflix, Disney, and other rights holders sent cease-and-desist letters, and ByteDance publicly promised to improve its safeguards. Deadline

What makes these stories hard to contain is the plumbing. The models are built in China, hosted on servers outside U.S. jurisdiction, and accessed by Western users through intermediary platforms that may have no direct relationship with the studios whose characters are being cloned. A takedown notice can remove a single clip, but the underlying model stays online, ready to generate the next one.

For the studios, the Office bootlegs land as fresh evidence in an ongoing fight over whether AI companies can be held responsible when their tools reproduce protected characters without permission. For everyone else, they are a glimpse of a near future in which any fictional character can be reanimated by anyone with a text prompt and a web connection.