Midjourney is an independent research lab that produces a proprietary artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion.
The tool is currently in open beta, which it entered on July 12, 2022, led David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion.
The best AI image generators are taking the internet by storm, and not necessarily in a good way.
Many artists and photographers are rightly furious at how these generators use datasets that contain hundreds of millions of artworks and photographs without consent from creators to train their AIs to create text-to-image results.
If you’re not familiar with AI-image generators by now, then it’s time to get up to speed.
These tools are growing in popularity as millions of people across the globe now have the power to create anything they can think of in no time at all.
These generators may be fun in practice, but in principle, they are potentially damaging artists and photographers in a large way.
Fuel has been added to the fire recently in an interview that has emerged from September with Forbes and David Holz, the founder and CEO of Midjourney, whereby Holz openly admits that the company has based its AI on existing artworks and photographs without any consent from the creators of them.
Many Twitter users and artists are outraged at the attitude of the CEO, being fully aware of using data sets containing millions of already existing artworks and images without consent and showing no remorse in doing such.
As these AI platforms learn and gain intelligence, able to generate extremely realistic images, they arguably become more of a threat to creative communities who hope to make a living.
Who would pay for a graphic designer or illustrator for a new book cover if the author can now create one themselves for free?
Holz may be claiming that the platform is intended purely for inspirational purposes and to bring ideas to life, but the ignorance surrounding the assumption that it isn’t primarily being used as a way to rip off and steal works and commission jobs from other artists is very disappointing, to put it politely.
The CEO/Founder suggests that his hands are tied in how the dataset sources content is also fibbery, as previously mentioned, other platforms who are developing AI image-generators are aware of the potential dangers and misuse, therefore have been adjusting the datasets accordingly and filtering sources.
