AI-Image Tool Midjourney Launches Magazine

Midjourney, one of the many artificial intelligence-driven image creation companies to crop up in the past six months, announced plans on Wednesday to launch a magazine. Priced at $4 per month, the website for the magazine is incredibly sparse at the moment, leaving a lot of open questions about what will be inside its pages.

“Each magazine features a selection of artwork curated from the 10,000 most highly rated images, as well as interviews with Midjourney community members,” Midjourney’s website reads.

Midjourney allows users to give text prompts that generate images, much like other big names in the field like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Midjourney tweeted that it will also include different prompts as content in its magazine.

Midjourney, which announced on Tuesday that it was using Google Cloud as its infrastructure provider, is currently being sued by a number of entities that allege the company has engaged in widespread copyright infringement. Midjourney, like all AI image creators, was trained on enormous numbers of image sets scraped from the internet, which allows it to create seemingly new works of art.

Curiously, the U.S. Copyright Office recently announced that any images created by AI aren’t protected by copyright, and it’s not clear whether the people who “created” these images that will appear in Midjourney’s magazine will be compensated in any way. These “creators” did little more than enter text prompts, but some people still see them as the artists, no matter what the U.S. Copyright Office has to say on the matter.

Midjourney did not immediately respond to questions emailed on Wednesday afternoon. I’ll update this post if I hear back.