Midjourney says “You’re liable for copyright infringement”
The Terms of Service state that if users “knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find you and collect that money from you. We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make you pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.”
The AI Researcher Gary Marcus said that Southen’s work “suggests that Midjourney has been trained on high-resolution copyright images, to which they may or may not have a license.”
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Transferring the copyright infringement responsibility to end user because ‘how else would we train our AI and get away with it?’
I imagine a bookstore distributing books that they do not know the sources & origin for profit, saying it is for education and innovation purposes, then claims not liable with fake copies or if the author complains because ‘all we do is list out the book you asked for’.
Most artists might be okay with you admiring/ using their material as part of your hobby that is not profit-generating.
But most won’t be happy with you taking them without consent to generate profit for yourself.
It is very likely Midjourney & some of its end users are doing this knowingly/unknowingly because it’s very easy to generate a similar 1:1 copy as the original (as shown in the article linked above).
Update: New York Times also sues OpenAI, Microsoft for copyright infringement.
