Midjourney artist list lawsuit – how they stole from artists.

The Midjourney AI image generator

A new year often means making new resolutions and forming better habits for many people. But for Midjourney Inc, 2024 began with a controversy over a collection of artists whose works the company used to train its generative AI program.

Artists posted a Google Sheet on the social media platforms X (previously known as Twitter) and Bluesky during the New Year’s weekend, alleging that it showed how Midjourney created a database that covered various time periods, styles, genres, movements, mediums, techniques, and thousands of artists to train its AI text-to-image generator. Jon Lam, a senior storyboard artist at Riot Games, also shared several photos of Midjourney software developers talking about the creation of an artist database to train the AI image generator to imitate.

Midjourney artist list with high value names

The 24-page, Midjourney list of artists, used as the training base for its AI picture generator (Exhibit J), contains modern and contemporary high-value names, as well as commercially successful illustrators for companies like Hasbro and Nintendo. Some of the famous artists are Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Anish Kapoor, Yayoi Kusama, Gerhard Richter, Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol, Ellsworth Kelly, Damien Hirst, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Paul Signac, Norman Rockwell, Paul Cézanne, Banksy, Walt Disney, and Vincent van Gogh.

Midjourney’s dataset also includes artists who made artwork for the popular trading card game Magic the Gathering, such as Hyan Tran, a six-year-old child and a one-time art contributor who helped raise money for Seattle Children’s Hospital in 2021.

Phil Foglio encouraged other artists to check the list to see if their names were there and to seek legal advice if they did not have one already.

The Google file was quickly blocked, but a copy has been uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Midjourney lawsuit

The list of 16,000 artists was part of a legal amendment to a class-action lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, along with the submission of 455 pages of additional evidence on November 29, 2018.

On October 30, a judge in California federal court dismissed multiple claims made by a group of artists against Midjourney

and DeviantArt, leading to the amendment. The class-action copyright lawsuit was initially filed more than a year ago in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

The Legal battle that could change the future of AI art forever

Last September, the US Copyright Review Board decided that an image made with Midjourney’s software could not be copyrighted because of how it was made. Jason M. Allen’s image won the $750 first prize in the digital category of art at the Colorado State Fair in 2022. The win became viral online, but it caused a lot of worry and fear among artists about the future of their profession.

Worried about artworks being scraped without permission and used to train AI image generators, researchers at the University of Chicago developed a digital tool that allows artists to help “poison” huge picture sets and disrupt text-to-image output.