Artists around the globe are pushing back against Midjourney following the circulation of two lists featuring names of artists scheduled for use as training material.
The artificial intelligence (AI) company is currently entangled in a class action suit claiming that it has violated the rights of artists by utilizing their works as training resources.
The first list was originally part of the legal case but was shared online last year by video game artist John Lam. The document has since been made private by its owners.
Midjourney developers caught discussing laundering, and creating a database of Artists (who have been dehumanized to styles) to train Midjourney off of. This has been submitted into evidence for the lawsuit. Prompt engineers, your “skills” are not yourshttps://t.co/wAhsNjt5Kz pic.twitter.com/EBvySMQC0P
— Jon Lam #CreateDontScrape (@JonLamArt) December 31, 2024
In addition to this list, a much larger spreadsheet containing nearly 16,000 artists labeled “proposed additions” has been circulating. The document is no longer public, but there is an archived version on The Wayback Machine.
According to screenshots shared by Lam, the list was shared on Midjourney’s public-facing Discord server. Speaking to NBC, Lam said, “It just seemed like they didn’t really put much effort into hiding anything because it was all public. So artists caught wind of this; we found the document.”
The developers intended to ‘preload’ certain styles, associated with artists, to enable quicker image generation. They encouraged users to propose more styles and images for their list.
Artists are suffering due to generative AI
Lam continues, expressing the feeling of shock at finding himself and his friends on the list: “When you click on the Artists tab, you literally see thousands and thousands of artists that we know. And a lot of my friends have found themselves on these lists — and they didn’t even know that they were being trained on.”
To anyone saying AI art is a tool for disabled artists, I want yall to know that MY WORK IS A PROMPT IN MIDJOURNEY. “Sara Winters” is on this list. I- a BLIND ARTIST- am being directly stolen from. I am blind and I create, not extrapolate.
Think on that for a moment. https://t.co/5lCTpVuoeb
— Sara Winters, MAGfest panelist (@divisionten) January 2, 2024
The senior storyboard artist at Riot Games went on to point out the harsh realities that generative AI has on human artists. “Everybody was just too excited with these image generators to really care about how the sausage was made. A lot of my friends are struggling to pay their rent and bills. Their commissions rates are being slashed because people are losing value.”
Generative AI is still highly controversial, as evidenced by the lawsuit. Artists argue that using their images to train AI, which can then reproduce work in their style, diminishes the hard work that goes into creating art. Researchers are going so far as to develop methods to “poison” images so they can’t be used in generative AI training data.
Featured image credit: Google DeepMind via Pexels
