An image from the Midjourney magazine website showing an issue dated April 2023.
Midjourney, one of several AI-based image-making companies to spring up in the past six months, announced plans to launch a magazine on Wednesday. Priced at $4 a month, the magazine’s website is incredibly sparse at the moment, leaving plenty of open questions about what will be on its pages.
“Each magazine features a selection of artwork selected from the top 10,000 rated images, as well as interviews with members of the Midjourney community,” the Midjourney website says.
Midjourney allows users to give text prompts that generate images, much like other big names in the field like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E. Mid Road tweeted that he will also include different prompts as content in his magazine.
Midjourney, which announced on Tuesday that it uses Google Cloud as its infrastructure provider, is currently being sued by a number of entities who allege the company engaged in widespread copyright infringement. Midjourney, like all AI image creators, has been trained on a huge number of image sets pulled from the internet, allowing it to create seemingly new works of art.
Curiously, the US Copyright Office recently announced that all images created by AI are not copyrighted, and it’s unclear whether the people who “created” these images that will appear in Midjourney magazine will be compensated in any way. These “creators” did little more than type in text prompts, but some people still consider them artists, no matter what the US Copyright Office has to say about it.
Midjourney did not immediately respond to emailed questions Wednesday afternoon. I will update this post if I have any news.