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"Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit Wednesday claiming that Midjourney ignored their earlier requests to cease violating their intellectual property rights, according to The Wall Street Journal. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, includes dozens of examples of images generated by Midjourney that depict the studio's copyrighted characters, like Homer Simpson and Darth Vader."

"Some are outraged at what they consider theft of their artistic trademark. Greg Rutkowski, a concept artist and illustrator well known for his golden-light infused epic fantasy scenes, has already been mentioned in hundreds of thousands of prompts used across Midjourney and Stable Diffusion. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski told MIT Technology Review. "That's concerning.""

""Essentially what this is doing is flattening descriptions of, say, 'an Indian person' or 'a Nigerian house' into particular stereotypes which could be viewed in a negative light," Amba Kak, executive director of the AI Now Institute, a U.S.-based policy research organization, told Rest of World. Even stereotypes that are not inherently negative, she said, are still stereotypes: They reflect a particular value judgment, and a winnowing of diversity. Midjourney did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story."

"According to the website Lexica, which tracks over 10 million images and prompts generated by Stable Diffusion, Rutkowski's name has been used as a prompt around 93,000 times. Some of the world's most famous artists, such as Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso, and Leonardo da Vinci, brought up around 2,000 prompts each or less. Rutkowski's name also features as a prompt thousands of times in the Discord of another text-to-image generator, Midjourney. Rutkowski was initially surprised but thought it might be a good way to reach new audiences. Then he tried searching for his name to see if a piece he had worked on had been published. The online search brought back work that had his name attached to it but wasn't his. "It's been just a month. What about in a year? I probably won't be able to find my work out there because [the internet] will be flooded with AI art," Rutkowski says. "That's concerning.""

"Most AI programs function like a "black box." "We know exactly what a model does but not why it has now specifically recognized that a picture shows a cat," said computer scientist Kristian Kersting of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany to the German-language newspaper Handelsblatt. That dilemma prompted Kersting-along with computer scientists Patrick Schramowski of the Technical University of Darmstadt and Björn Deiseroth, Mayukh Deb and Samuel Weinbach, all at the Heidelberg, Germany-based AI company Aleph Alpha-to introduce an algorithm called AtMan earlier this year. AtMan allows large AI systems such as ChatGPT, Dall-E and Midjourney to finally explain their outputs."

"Their tools analyze content using sophisticated algorithms, picking up on subtle signals to distinguish the images made with computers from the ones produced by human photographers and artists. But some tech leaders and misinformation experts have expressed concern that advances in A.I. will always stay a step ahead of the tools. To assess the effectiveness of current A.I.-detection technology, The New York Times tested five new services using more than 100 synthetic images and real photos. The results show that the services are advancing rapidly, but at times fall short."

"ow, legal redress is all very well, but it's usually beyond the resources of working artists. And lawsuits are almost always retrospective, after the damage has been done. It's sometimes better, as in rugby, to "get your retaliation in first". Which is why the most interesting news of the week was that a team of researchers at the University of Chicago have developed a tool to enable artists to fight back against permissionless appropriation of their work by corporations. Appropriately, it's called Nightshade and it "lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it's scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways" - dogs become cats, cars become cows, and who knows what else? (Boris Johnson becoming piglet, with added grease perhaps?) It's a new kind of magic. And the good news is that corporations might find it black. Or even deadly."

"Just like Napster forced legal music streaming to advance, popular tools like ChatGPT, Midjourney, and DALL-E2 will force us to establish AI best practices and ethical guidelines. The IP for Generative AI will continue to be debated in the culture and in the courts, and we will collectively come to agreements. The only issue is whether regulation will ever be able to keep up with the rapid pace of AI."

"'One day I overheard my boss saying: just put it in ChatGPT': the workers who lost their jobs to AI From a radio host replaced by avatars to a comic artist whose drawings have been copied by Midjourney, how does it feel to be replaced by a bot?"

"Will this AI take jobs from artists? Where does copyright law land? Can machines ever truly produce something original? Should I feel guilty for making a picture of Tony Soprano having a cappuccino with Shrek and sharing it with my group chat?"

"AI-generated art illustrates another problem with technology"

"While the systemic brutality used by Colombian police to quell national protests in 2021 was real and is well documented, photos recently used by Amnesty International to highlight the issue were not. The international human rights advocacy group has come under fire for posting images generated by artificial intelligence in order to promote their reports on social media - and has since removed them. The images, including one of a woman being dragged away by police officers, depict the scenes during protests that swept across Colombia in 2021. But any more than a momentary glance at the images reveals that something is off."

"The model is AI-generated, a digital rendering of a human being that will start appearing on Levi's e-commerce website later this year. The brand teamed with LaLaLand.ai, a digital studio that makes customized AI models for companies like Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, to dream up this avatar. Amy Gershkoff Bolles, Levi's global head of digital and emerging technology strategy, announced the model's debut at a Business of Fashion event in March. AI models will not completely replace the humans, she said, but will serve as a "supplement" intended to aid in the brand's representation of various sizes, skin tones and ages."

"n a statement on his website, Eldagsen, who studied photography and visual arts at the Art Academy of Mainz, conceptual art and intermedia at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, and fine art at the Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication in Hyderabad, said he "applied as a cheeky monkey" to find out if competitions would be prepared for AI images to enter. "They are not," he added. "We, the photo world, need an open discussion," said Eldagsen. "A discussion about what we want to consider photography and what not. Is the umbrella of photography large enough to invite AI images to enter - or would this be a mistake?"