The
founder of Midjourney , a San Francisco-based
artificial intelligence program, has admitted that he scraped some 100
million images from the Internet, many of them without permission from official
anime and manga creators.
Via
Petapixel, Midjourney founder David Holz admitted in a resurfaced interview
that the site has copied around 100 million images, revealing to Forbes how it
was done. « It's just a big download from the Internet. We use
published open datasets and train on them. And I would say that it is something
that 100% of people do. We were not picky . He said they did not
seek consent from living artists or works that were still protected by
copyright, adding: " No. There's really no way to get a hundred
million images and know where they come from ."
Holz's
argument for why Midjourney did not seek consent stems from what he considers a
lack of proper identification method of what art belongs to whom. « It
would be great if the images had embedded metadata about the copyright owner or
something. But that does not exist; there is no record . Regarding
the opt-out, he adds: “ We are studying it. The challenge now is to
find out what the rules are and how to find out if a person is really the
artist of a specific work or just giving their name. "We have not found
anyone who wants his name removed from the data set that we have been able to
find ."
Although
proving original ownership may be more difficult for smaller artists, the
docket of artists used by Midjourney includes high-profile and easily verifiable
creators such as Eiichiro Oda of “One Piece,” Masashi Kishimoto of “Naruto,”
and thousands of other artists. . Despite this, Midjourney users can generate AI art
based on their works. Recently, anime association NAFCA sat down with Magmix
and ethical AI developers Anime Chain to discuss what could be done about the
rise of AI in art creation. Anime Chain argued that AI was inevitable
and that anime creators needed to take the lead before Big Tech monopolized the
field.
Source: Forbes
