Is MidJourney just copying other artists' work?
This is the big question, right? Is Midjourney stealing other people's art and claiming it as its own? Well let's take a look at how these systems work. But before I do, while MidJourney DOES prohibit certain words, they could just prohibit the names of artists, if they wanted to prevent their product from building works like existing artists. This is clearly not a technological hurdle. So it's odd that this feature is in there, considering the potential harm it could cause artists... Okay onward then. We don't actually know how Midjourney works internally, as it's a closed source product at the moment. But we can assume it is similar to other machine learning systems. And that means it probably uses a Generative Adversarial Network (or GAN) to do its magic. GANs work by basically pitting two AI concepts against each other. There's a ton of info on GANs today, so I'll skip that and just say that at its simplest, you can think of it like this: one part of th...