Midjourney
Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence program and service created and hosted by the San Francisco–based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion.[1][2] It is one of the technologies of the AI boom.
The tool is currently in open beta, which it entered on July 12, 2022.[3] The Midjourney team is led by David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion.[4] Holz told The Register in August 2022 that the company was already profitable.[5] Users create artwork with Midjourney using Discord bot commands.[6]
Functionality[edit]
Midjourney is accessible through a Discord bot, either through their official Discord server, by directly messaging the bot, or by inviting the bot to a third-party server. To generate images, users use the /imagine command and type in a prompt;[20] the bot then returns a set of four images, which users are given the option to upscale.
Litigation[edit]
On January 13, 2023, three artists – Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz – filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, claiming that these companies have infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web, without the consent of the original artists.[49]
The legal action was initiated in San Francisco by attorney Matthew Butterick in partnership with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the same team challenging Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI (developers of ChatGPT and DALL-E) in court. In July 2023, U.S. District Judge William Orrick inclined to dismiss most of the lawsuit filed by Andersen, McKernan, and Ortiz but allowed them to file a new complaint.[50] Another lawsuit was filed in November 2023 against Midjourney, Stability AI, DeviantArt and Runway AI for using the copyrighted work of over 4,700 artists.[51]