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Midjourney Inc. is a research lab specializing in design, human infrastructure, and artificial intelligence. The company's primary product is an AI model, also called Midjourney, which generates images informed by a set of inputs carried out per the direction of the user. The model is accessed via Discord, and artists can also follow the platform to see the designs for inspiration or to make creations. Midjourney licenses the designs from creators, while users own the images. Design studios and marketing firms utilize these generated assets to design and create mock-ups for clients. Users of the product are allowed to sell the images that are generated, but they waive the right to exclusivity if another individual recreates the image with similar inputs. However, users who pay for higher tiers of service are given access to a private Discord, where they can pick and choose the creations that remain private or open to the public, and the inputs that generate the creations.
Unlike other high-profile generative AI start-ups, Midjourney Inc. is not venture capital-funded. In an August 2022 interview, Midjourney founder David Holz stated the company is already profitable, describing the company as:
We're not like a start-up that raises a lot of money and then isn't sure what their business or product is and loses money for a long time... We're like a self-funded research lab. We can lose some amount of money. We don't have like $100 million of somebody else's money to lose. To be honest, we're already profitable, and we're fine. It's a pretty simple business model, which is, do people enjoy using it? Then if they do, they have to pay the cost of using it because the raw cost is actually quite expensive. And then we add a percentage on top of that, which is hopefully enough to feed and house us. And so that's what we're doing.
Midjourney was founded by David Holz, who previously started VR/AR company Leap Motion. Holz started working on Midjourney, a self-funded research lab, in August 2021, first testing the raw image-generation technology in September 2021. Midjourney's image-generating software went into limited beta on March 21, 2022, and open beta on July 12, 2022. In July 2022, the research lab began testing the third iteration (V3) of its image-generating algorithms. In an August 2022 interview with The Verge, Holz described his motivation for starting Midjourney:
I founded Leap Motion and ran that for 12 years, [but] eventually, I was looking for a different environment instead of a big venture-backed company, and I left to start Midjourney. Right now, it’s pretty small — we’re like 10 people, we have no investors, and we’re not really financially motivated. We’re not under pressure to sell something or be a public company. It’s just about having a home for the next 10 years to work on cool projects that matter—hopefully not just to me but to the world—and to have fun.
V5 of Midjournery was released on March 15th, 2023. The model improves its interpretation of natural language prompts, generates higher-resolution images, and supports advanced features such as repeating patterns. In April 2023, the company released a new feature reversing the image generation process, allowing users to transform images into words.
In January 2023, three artists launched a lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI (creators of Stable Diffusion), and artist portfolio platform DeviantArt, which recently created its own AI art generator, DreamUp. The artists allege these organizations infringed on millions of artists' rights when scraping the internet for images to train their AI models. The lawsuit has been filed by Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the same team also suing Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a case involving the AI programming model CoPilot, which is trained on lines of code collected from the web.
In a September 2022 interview, Midjourney founder Holz admitted to not seeking consent when scraping the internet for images to train the Midjourney software. When asked "Did you seek consent from living artists or work still under copyright?" he replied:
No. There isn’t really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they’re coming from. It would be cool if images had metadata embedded in them about the copyright owner or something. But that's not a thing; there's not a registry. There’s no way to find a picture on the Internet, and then automatically trace it to an owner and then have any way of doing anything to authenticate it.
