Film concept artist Reid Southen (“The Hunger Games”) has been pointing out AI platform MidJourney’s blatant plagiarism for some time now. Late last week, Southen posted some very damning evidence on X (formally Twitter). He shared a collection of screenshots from different users showing AI prompts of famous paintings, including Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” spitting out almost identical images.
Several users wrote these examples off since the paintings are in the public domain, therefore fair game to be replicated. Southen doubled down and showed MidJourney is also doing this with copyrighted work. He shared a prompt of Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Phillips’s 2019 film “Joker” that is eerily similar to a film still. Even going so far as to make a GIF overlaying the two images to show how little difference there is.
He was able to repeat this with Thanos from the “Avengers” films, scenes in 2022’s “The Batman,” and “Black Widow” (where he intentionally misspelled actress Scarlett Johansson’s name). As well as 2021’s “The Matrix Resurrections,” adding insult to injury since Southen worked on the film. This led him and other users to the conclusion that Midjourney is being trained on high-resolution copyright images. Which they may or may not have a license to use.
Some argue this may be a case of duplication without attribution. The issue with that is these images, while insanely similar, did have slight variances, for example, the image from “Joker” has darker lighting and slight changes in the nose and hair. Showing that this is AI-generated to some degree, not just the system accidentally spitting out an image it was fed. The output was also not marked as being directly premised on copyrighted work. To top it all off, Southen was able to get these results with almost no effort. For “The Matrix Resurrections,” image, his prompt was actually for the original 1999 film. “It infringes so hard, you don’t even need to be accurate,” he wrote.
How did Midjourney react?
How any major company being called out on something blatantly illegal would, by banning Southen from the platform. This revokes his privileges to make more images, but it also wiped his history/all the evidence he had created. Thankfully, screenshots are forever and little to none of this evidence was accually lost.
Southen also pointed out an insulting self-aware bit of MidJourney’s Terms of Service. “If You knowingly infringe someone else’s intellectual property, and that costs us money, we’re going to come find You and collect that money from You,” it reads. “We might also do other stuff, like try to get a court to make You pay our legal fees. Don’t do it.” This passage kind of makes it impossible for Midjourney to act like they didn’t know this was happening.
