Leak Names 16,000 Artists Allegedly Scraped by Midjourney
Exhibition view: Wang Xin, In the Flow of Becoming – An Awakening Art Log from a Fictional AI Artist, de Sarthe, Hong Kong (22 January–12 March 2022). Courtesy de Sarthe.
Artists fighting back against AI image makers have new ammunition after information was allegedly leaked by Midjourney.
On 1 January Riot Games storyboard artist Jon Lam tweeted a link to a Google spreadsheet that names thousands of artists allegedly used to help Midjourney replicate their styles.
Among those listed in the Google spreadsheet are David Choe, David Hockney, Tony Cragg, Tracey Emin, Yoko Ono, and Yayoi Kusama.
The list also includes cartoonists Sarah Andersen and Julia Kaye, and illustrators Karla Ortiz, Grzegorz Rutkowski, and Gerald Brom, all of whom are plaintiffs in an ongoing class action lawsuit against Midjourney, Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Runway AI for the unlicensed use of their artworks.
Lam’s tweet also included screenshots of messages, purportedly written by Midjourney developers, discussing how to create plausible deniability for their use of artists’ works without their consent.
One of them reads, ‘all you have to do is just use those scraped datasets and the [sic] conveniently forget what you used to train the model. Boom legal problems solved forever’.
Lam’s tweet has been viewed 8.1 million times and shared over 20,000 times. —[O]
Main image: Exhibition view: Wang Xin, In the Flow of Becoming – An Awakening Art Log from a Fictional AI Artist, de Sarthe, Hong Kong (22 January–12 March 2022). Courtesy de Sarthe.
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