Midjourney

[6][7] Midjourney, Inc. was founded in San Francisco, California, by David Holz,[8] previously a co-founder of Leap Motion.

[3] On March 14, 2022, the Midjourney Discord server launched with a request to post high-quality photographs to Twitter and Reddit for systems training.

[24] Midjourney introduced its web interface to make its tools more accessible, moving beyond its initial reliance on Discord.

The web editor consolidates tools such as image editing, panning, zooming, region variation, and inpainting into a single interface.

This shift was in response to growing competition from other AI image generation platforms like Adobe Firefly and Google’s Imagen, which had already launched as native web apps with integration into popular design tools.

Architects have described using the software to generate mood boards for the early stages of projects, as an alternative to searching Google Images.

[32][33] In Italy, the leading newspaper Corriere della Sera published a comic created with Midjourney by writer Vanni Santoni in August 2022.

[36][37] A Midjourney image called Théâtre D'opéra Spatial won first place in the digital art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair.

The two category judges were unaware that Midjourney used AI to generate images, although they later said that had they known this, they would have awarded Allen the top prize anyway.

"[31] In 2023, the realism of AI-based text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion,[41][42] reached such a high level that it led to a significant wave of viral AI-generated photos.

Widespread attention was gained by a Midjourney-generated photo of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer coat,[43][44] the fictional arrest of Donald Trump,[45] and a hoax of an attack on the Pentagon,[46] as well as the usage in professional creative arts.

[49] A study by researchers at the nonprofit group Center for Countering Digital Hate found the tool to be easy to use to generate racist and conspiratorial images.

[55][56] Commencing in May 2023, with subsequent updates post version 5, Midjourney transitioned to an AI-powered content moderation system.

At the same time, the system will prevent the generation of contentious images, such as depictions of global leaders, including Xi Jinping, in situations of arrest.

[57] On January 13, 2023, three artists—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz—filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, claiming that these companies have infringed on the rights of millions of artists by training AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web, without the consent of the original artists.

[58] The legal action was initiated in San Francisco by attorney Matthew Butterick in partnership with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, the same team challenging Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI (developers of ChatGPT and DALL-E) in court.

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial , a Midjourney image that won first prize in a digital art competition
Image from Alice and Sparkle , a children's book illustrated by Midjourney. Time describes this image as "showing the limits of the AI-powered technology. The illustration has several apparent flaws, including the character appearing to have claws." [ 31 ]
A fake Midjourney-created image of Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket, which went viral in 2023
An incorrect diagram of the anatomy of a rat, showing large testicles that are the size of its head and a large penis that towers over the rat itself.
An anatomically incorrect diagram of a rat's penis and testicles illustrated by Midjourney, published in a now-retracted Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology paper, [ 52 ] which went viral in 2024. [ 53 ]