LogInMidjourney's founder and CEO David Holz spoke about the tool's goal to unlock people's creativity and addressed the concerns regarding the ethics of producing AI-generated images.
David Holz, founder and CEO of Midjourney
There are currently plenty of AI tools capable of turning text into images out there in the open – they're able to access millions of image datasets and produce images closely related to a prompt a creator enters. One of the most popular ones here is probably Midjourney – an "artistic" chat-powered AI image-generating tool created by an independent research lab of the same name.
While Midjourney's model is similar to OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, and other analogous tools, there is one thing that makes Midjourney stand out from the others – the platform is not designed to create photorealistic images. According to its creators, it only helps ordinary people to unlock their creativity by creating images describing the images they wish to make.
In an interview with Forbes, Midjourney's founder and CEO emphasized that it is exactly what the tool was made for, noting that the lab's mission is to "expand the imaginative powers of the human species" and "make humans more imaginative" instead of making "imaginative machines."
According to Holz, Midjourney can be a great tool for both professional artists who use it for concepting as well as ordinary people (who, as Holz notes, make up the majority of the tool's user base) who wish to express themselves in art when they don't have artistic skills.
"It's important to emphasize that this is not about art. This is about imagination. Imagination is sometimes used for art but it's often not," Holz said. "Most of the images created on Midjourney aren’t being used professionally. They aren’t even being shared. They’re just being used for these other purposes, these very human needs."
Still, AI-generated art is quite a controversial topic. Despite some people being impressed by it and perceiving it just as a cool new technology, there are also those (mostly, artists) who are concerned about the ethics of producing AI-generated images.
Artists often claim that generative art is a form of theft as AI models have been trained using artists' original works without their consent. They're also worried that companies might cancel artist contracts in favor of faster, cheaper AI-generated images.
Addressing the latter concern, Holz shared that he believes that there indeed will be some companies that would like to choose AI-generated images over real artists to cut costs, however, according to him, those companies will "fail in the market."
"I think the market will go towards higher quality, more creativity, and vastly more sophisticated, diverse and deep content," he said. "And the people who actually are able to use like the artists and use the tools to do that are the ones who are going to win."
"There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that's not a thing; there's not a registry," he said. "We’re looking at [the possibility to let artists out of being included in Midjourney's data training model]. The challenge now is finding out what the rules are, and how to figure out if a person is really the artist of a particular work or just putting their name on it."
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