Midjourney AI embarks on media journey, launches monthly magazine

Popular creative tool Midjourney, artificial intelligence (AI) powered company, has embarked on a new journey with the launch of a monthly magazine amid controversies.

The magazine will feature “a selection of artwork curated from the 10,000 most highly rated images” and interviews with community members, according to the California-based company, an independent research lab. “We’re launching a monthly Midjourney magazine! Every issue has interviews, breathtaking images, and of course, prompts,” Midjourney announced on Wednesday. “Join us in celebrating our community's creativity, imagination, and the increasing manifestation of the human mind.” The $4 monthly magazine's website is, however, incredibly underdeveloped, leaving many unanswered questions. Midjourney produces an AI program that generates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. The underlying technology used by the company is speculated to be based on Stable Diffusion.

The firm also revealed on Tuesday that Google Cloud would be serving as its infrastructure supplier.

Midjourney, like all AI picture producers, was taught using a vast amount of image sets that were downloaded from the internet, which enables it to produce art that appears to be entirely original.

AI- copyright controversies

However, the company has been marred with controversies, with a number of parties actively suing the corporation, alleging extensive copyright infringement. Earlier last month, a lawsuit was filed by Getty Images against Stability AI, the company behind the well-known AI picture creator Stable Diffusion. The stock agency said that more than 12 million of its copyrighted images—along with their captions and metadata—were used to teach Steady Diffusion, seeking $1.8 trillion in compensation. Strangely, the U.S. Copyright Office recently declared that AI-generated photographs are not copyright protected, and it is unclear if those who "created" the images that will appear in Midjourney's magazine would receive any sort of payment.

Despite the U.S. Copyright Office's position on the topic, some people continue to view these "creators," who essentially did nothing more than type text instructions, as the artists. The use of AI in art is criticized by many for a variety of reasons. Some claim it lacks spirit, while others claim it plagiarizes the work of other artists.

In an interview with Interesting Engineering (IE) last year, Hasan Ragab, an Egyptian-born American architect and computational designer, mentioned that criticism of AI art might have some basis in how this potent instrument can be abused, just like any new technology.

He, however, emphasized that "these instruments need to be investigated, comprehended, and disputed in an unbiased way to have a well-informed opinion.