Midjourney Faces Plagiarism Accusations Once More

Film concept artist Reid Southen has accused AI platform Midjourney of plagiarism, providing evidence of the platform producing almost identical images to famous paintings and copyrighted work. Southen shared screenshots of AI prompts generating images of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and Joaquin Phoenix in the film “Joker,” among others. He also discovered that MidJourney is being trained on high-resolution copyright images without a clear license. Some argue that this may be a case of duplication without attribution, but the AI-generated images show slight variances indicating it was not accidental. MidJourney reacted by banning Southen from the platform, removing his evidence. However, screenshots of the accusations remain. Southen also highlighted a self-aware passage in MidJourney’s Terms of Service, which acknowledges the infringement of intellectual property.