Midjourney image generator

Midjourney is a subscription-based AI programme created by a company of the same name that creates images from textual descriptions. 

Midjourney was available in open beta since its launch in July 2022 via a Discord bot on its official Discord. In March 2023, Midjourney version 5 was released, significantly improving the quality of images depicting people.

Risks and harms

Midjourney has met with criticism and resistance across multiple topics:

Bias/discrimination

• Research on the visualisation of journalistic roles indicated Midjourney-generated images are biased.

• Buzzfeed came under fire for publishing a list of AI-generated images that portrayed Barbie in 195 countries in a manner that was seen to reinforce racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Copyright

Midjourney and similar AI image generation tools have been criticised for being trained on human-made art scraped from the web, and copied or remixed without attribution. 

• The San Francisco Ballet was accused of IP theft after it had used a Midjourney-generated image to promote its annual Nutcracker production

• Ammaar Reeshi drew the ire of artists and illustrators for creating childrens book Alice and Sparkle over a single weekend using Midjourney

• The US Copyright Office ruled that Midjourney-generated images used in the comic book Zarya of the Dawn should not have been granted copyright protection

Midjourney and similar services also faced public backlashes from prominent art communities and artists, notably after Midjourney founder David Holz outraged artists, illustrators and photographers by confessing to using hundreds of millions of images Midjourney didn’t have permission for to train its AI image generator.

Employment

• Artists lamented Jason Allen's first place at a Colorado fine art competition for accelerating the death of creative jobs

• Atlantic journalist Charlie Warzel's use of a Midjourney-created image of InfoWars provocateur Alex Jones prompted people to accuse the magazine of eliminating the need for illustrators and cutting costs

Mis/disinformation

• A deepfake image of Pope Francis clad in a Belanciaga puffer jacket went viral

• Deepfake images of Donald Trump being 'arrested' went viral

Safety

While Midjourney is generally considered safer than Stable Diffusion, DALL-E and other image generation systems, it has still proved possible to produce images of pornstars and other NSFW content.

• In February 2023, Midjourney attempted to block porn by banning words about the human reproductive system. 

Transparency

Artists can request their work to be removed from Midjourney if they believe their copyright has been infringed. 

However, Midjourney only introduced the feature after artists complained, and then made it challenging for artists to remove their work by burying the information in the app terms of service.

Research, advocacy

• Stanford HAI (2023). 2023 AI Index Report - 3.2 AI Incidents (pdf)

• Thomas R.J., Thomson T.J. (2023). What Does a Journalist Look like? Visualizing Journalistic Roles through AI

• Wolfe R., Yang Y., Howe B., Aylin Caliskan A. (2022). Contrastive Language-Vision AI Models Pretrained on Web-Scraped Multimodal Data Exhibit Sexual Objectification Bias (pdf)