Text-to-image generator Midjourney began alpha testing its newest models, version 6, on December 21. Users were quick to claim that the update, which appeared to expand the generator's capabilities, includes results that appear too similar to well-known copyrighted art.
Reid Southen, a concept artist and illustrator who has worked with some of the biggest movie studios, including Marvel and DC, said Friday that the model's output for certain cues is an unaltered iteration of copyrighted training data.
One user prompted the model with the phrase “Joaquin Phoenix's Joker movie, 2019, movie screenshot, movie scene.” The result was a nearly identical image from the 2019 film “Joker,” starring Joaquin Phoenix.
Related: Human creativity persists in the era of generative ai
It's clearly spitting out training data. Here's someone pointing out 'Joaquin Phoenix's Joker Movie, 2019, Movie Screenshot, Movie Scene.' pic.twitter.com/haIEHzGDpB
-Marge Nelk (@NelkMarge) December 22, 2023
Southen continued to replicate similar results from other well-known films. A number of examples are included Thanosfrom “Avengers: Endgame”; bat Man from “Batman” and black widow from “Black Widow.”
Southen says Midjourney responded ban kicked him off the company's Discord platform, effectively preventing him from using the Midjourney service, deleting his prompt history, and canceling his subscription to the service.
ai researcher Gary Marcus said that Southen's work “suggests that Midjourney has been trained on high-resolution copyrighted images, for which they may or may not have a license.”
Midjourney did not respond to a request for comment.
I wasn't going to do this, but why? @middle of the trip bombed my account for exposing his plagiarism and copyright infringement, here's an 11 minute video of me scrolling through all the offending generations on Discord. Enjoy. pic.twitter.com/bW4lszGzwh
—Reid Southen (@Rahll) December 23, 2023
Marcus said that Southen required little effort to create these repeated instances of copyrighted work, and that the copyrighted production “was not marked as directly based on a copyrighted work.”
Southen on Sunday noted a change to the company's Terms of Service that was added sometime after the V6 update was released, apparently after Southen and other users began highlighting what they claimed was a plagiarized result.
“You may not use the Service to attempt to infringe the intellectual property rights of others, including copyrights, patents or trademarks,” one of these additions read. “Doing so may expose you to penalties including legal action or a permanent ban from the Service.”
He Terms of Service Also, state that if users “knowingly infringe someone else's intellectual property, and it costs us money, we will come after you and collect that money from you. We could also do other things, like try to get a court to convict you.” Pay our legal fees. Do not do it”.
I consider this to be irrefutable proof of Midjourney's blatant copyright infringement. A 6 word message can replicate a Dune almost 1:1 each time. These are not variations, it is the same message running repeatedly.
Try it yourself. Merry Christmas mid-trip. pic.twitter.com/2wpeTwxS0Q
—Reid Southen (@Rahll) December 24, 2023
“To put it bluntly: If you care about artists, do NOT use Midjourney again until they remove this new policy.” Marco said. “They are replicating copyrighted art, quite possibly without consent or compensation, AND threatening litigation against anyone who investigates.”
Related: The Ethics of artificial intelligence: A Path to Responsible ai
Artists and ai: Copyright Concerns
Concerns about copyright violations have been at the center of the ai conversation since ChatGPT went live last year.
A lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild v. Microsoft and OpenAI argues that the companies' models are based on copyrighted works, which were acquired and used without notice, credit or compensation.
“These algorithms are at the heart of Defendants' massive business enterprise,” the lawsuit alleges. “And at the heart of these algorithms is systematic theft on a massive scale.”
ai-artgenerators-copyright-litigation”>A lawsuit filed against Midjourney and several of their peers argue that “ai imaging products are primarily valued as copyright laundering devices, promising customers the benefits of art without the artists' costs.”
The U.S. Copyright Office said in August that it is studying the intersection of copyright law and generative ai to determine how best to regulate the sector.
The companies involved have claimed that the copyrighted art they train their models on is what is called fair use. That's a component of copyright law which allows limited use of copyrighted material for purposes such as “reviews, comments, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research.”
In this case, however, Marvel has several trademarks on the character of Thanos and DC maintains many trademarks in Batman.
Technologist and composer Ed Newton-Rex noted that it was important to remember that other companies and other models do the same thing with a little more subtlety.
“They copy the jobs during training and implement some simple tricks to try to prevent users from seeing obvious copies,” he wrote in a mail in X.
MidJourney v6 is much better at including words in images
Here are some examples.
Notices in ALT! pic.twitter.com/EAGdq65hEZ
—Ammaar Reshi (@ammaar) December 21, 2023
“tech companies often reward or thank people for exposing flaws in their technology so they can fix them.” Southen said.
“What does Midjourney do when I do that? Double ban and update (the Terms of Service) to blame users for any infringing content they generate from the model trained specifically on that content.”
Several artists recently told TheStreet that the biggest problem with generative ai is not that it exists, but the countless ways it is misused to exploit artists and devalue art.
Contact Ian with ai stories by email, [email protected] or Signal at 732-804-1223.
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