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Text-to-image users of Midjourney cite problems with the most recent upgrade.
Generator of text to image On December 21, Midjourney started alpha testing its most recent version-6 models. People immediately complained that the upgrade, which appeared to increase the generator's capacity, produced results that were uncannily identical to well-known works of copyrighted art.
The model's output for certain prompts is an unaltered version of copyrighted training data, according to concept designer and illustrator Reid Southen, who has collaborated with some of the largest movie companies, including Marvel and DC. Southen made this statement on Friday.
"Joaquin Phoenix Joker movie, 2019, screenshot from a movie, movie scene" was the prompt given by a user to the model. The result was a nearly exact still from Joaquin Phoenix's 2019 movie "Joker."
Southen continued to reproduce comparable outcomes from other popular films. Among the many instances were Black Widow from "Black Widow," Batman from "The Batman," and Thanos from "Avengers: Endgame."
In response, according to Southen, Midjourney erased his prompting history, canceled his subscription, and banned him from the company's Discord platform, so preventing him from accessing the Midjourney service.
According to Gary Marcus, an AI researcher, Southen's work "suggests that Midjourney has been trained on high-resolution copyright images, to which they may or may not have a license."
A request for comment from Midjourney was not answered.
Marcus claimed that Southen produced these repeated examples of copyrighted work with little effort and that the output that was protected by copyright was "not marked as being directly premised on copyrighted work."
On Sunday, Southen brought attention to a modification made to the company's Terms of Service, which was modified at some point after the V6 upgrade was released, possibly in response to Southen and other users drawing attention to what they perceived to be copied work.
"You may not use the Service to try to violate the intellectual property rights of others, including copyright, patent, or trademark rights," one of these modifications states. "Doing so may subject you to penalties including legal action or a permanent ban from the Service."
