Midjourney faces backlash as 16,000 artists’ identities allegedly revealed

In a recent development, Riot Games storyboard artist Jon Lam shared a Google spreadsheet on January 1, exposing the names of thousands of artists reportedly utilized by Midjourney without consent for training AI algorithms

Lists featuring over 16,000 artists’ names, reportedly used to train the Midjourney generative artificial intelligence program, have been leaked, attracting widespread attention online.

The leaked list includes prominent figures such as David Choe, David Hockney, Tony Cragg, Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono, and Yayoi Kusama. Notably, artists involved in an ongoing class-action lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Runway AI – among them are cartoonists Sarah Andersen and Julia Kaye and illustrators Karla Ortiz, Grzegorz Rutkowski and Gerald Brom.

Riot Games storyboard artist Jon Lam shared a Google spreadsheet link on Jan. 1, listing thousands of artists purportedly utilized to assist Midjourney in emulating their artistic styles. Screenshots accompanying Lam’s tweet allegedly depict conversations among Midjourney developers discussing strategies to establish plausible deniability regarding the unauthorized use of artists’ works. One message suggests using scraped datasets and conveniently forgetting the sources as a way to evade legal repercussions.

Lam’s tweet has gained significant traction, amassing 8.5 million views and over 18,800 shares.

Midjourney developers caught discussing laundering, and creating a database of Artists (who have been dehumanized to styles) to train Midjourney off of. This has been submitted into evidence for the lawsuit. Prompt engineers, your “skills” are not yourshttps://t.co/wAhsNjt5Kz pic.twitter.com/EBvySMQC0P

— Jon Lam #CreateDontScrape (@JonLamArt) December 31, 2023

Source: Newsroom & Ocula