Following a tweet by Riot Games’ Jon Lam, a storyboard artist, sharing screenshots of conversations with Midjourney CEO David Holz on the company’s Discord server, a list featuring over 4,000 artists whose creations were utilized to train artificial intelligence (AI) models has been circulating on social media. The discussions also included a link to a roster of musicians sourced from “Wikipedia and special The Gathering.” This information serves as inspiration for artists on Medium seeking to create work in similar styles.
The compilation includes renowned comic book artists such as John Romita Jr. (excluding Sr.), Bernie Wrightson, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Carl Barks, Ernie Bushmiller, Rube Goldberg, James Kochalka, Kate Beaton, Frank Miller, Dave McKean, Alex Toth, Molly Ostertag, Roz Chast, and Sarah Andersen. In the realm of manga, notable names like Masashi Kishimoto, Hiro Mashima (Fairy Tail), Eiichiro Oda (One Piece), Naoko Takeuchi (Sailor Moon), Akira Toriyama (Dragon Ball), and Natsuki Takaya are featured.
While the list encompasses creators from various comic mediums, it overlooks several prominent figures like Dav Pilkey, Greg Capullo, Werther Dell’Erdera, and Peach Momoko. Notably, the absence of artists such as John Jennings, Brian Stelfreeze, Ronald Wimberly, Afua Richardson, and Dwayne McDuffie raises questions. Additionally, Magic: The Gathering artists like Reid Southen, Melissa Benson, Richard Kane Ferguson, Ron Spencer, Susan Van Camp, Rob Alexander, Donato Giancola, and MTG custom artist Melissa De Tora are mentioned. Holz mentioned in the recorded conversations the creation of “significant portions of MTG cards as training data sequences.”
A class-action lawsuit filed by multiple artists against Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt in January 2023 includes the public disclosure of the list, currently archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The lawsuit alleges that Stable Diffusion, utilized by the three platforms, was trained using the LAION-5B dataset, comprising billions of images that featured artists’ works without their consent or compensation.
Beyond the legal realm, the conflict extends to academia, where researchers at the University of Chicago have developed Glaze, a tool designed to counter AI infringement and protect artists’ intellectual property.
