Despite technical and IP infringement issues, can Midjourney actually build a holodeck? Reid Southen has his doubts.

matrix resurrection Artwork by Reid Southern (copyright Warner Brothers)

Midjourney plans to create an open world of sorts. "holodeck", as CEO David Holz confirmed to me earlier this month. But this actually begs the question: Is it feasible to do so?

The company is already turning its attention to IP infringement lawsuits against 2D image creators, based on reports of rampant copyright infringement, including: Lawsuit led by artist Jon LammMidjourney staff (including Holz) on purpose "washed" Add the work of thousands of artists to educational databases without their consent.

So what happens when Midjourney tries to create a platform with immersive 3D content?

David Southen, a film industry concept artist who worked on Marvel and DC films, processionand alien The franchise is very questionable.

"In terms of being able to do something like this without IP issues?" As he said. "They can’t even do what they’re doing without IP issues, and I doubt they’re paying any more attention to their data sets than they used to, so I’d say no."

Southen probably knows it, and not just because of his impeccable eccentric artist beliefs. He recently worked with renowned AI ethicist Gary Marcus to write this report highlighting existing problems.

These results provide strong evidence that Midjourney trained on copyrighted material and demonstrate that at least some generative AI systems can produce plagiarized output even when not directly requested, potentially exposing users to copyright infringement lawsuits. do. Recent journalism supports the same conclusion. For example, the lawsuit introduced Midjourney’s spreadsheet, which contained a list of more than 4,700 artists allegedly used for training, possibly without consent. For more information about generative AI data scraping, see Create, Don’t Scrap.

How much of Midjourney’s source material is copyrighted and used without a license? We don’t know for sure.

For more information about this, check out Marcus’ blog.

And unlike most 2D artists, high-quality 3D files tend to be owned by people like major game publishers and movie effects companies, who aren’t particularly keen on giving away their content for free and hire dedicated lawyers to protect them. that.

Regarding the technical challenges, Reid continued:

Midjourney developers were caught discussing laundering and creating a database of artists (dehumanized in style) to train Midjourney. This was submitted as evidence in the lawsuit. Rapid Engineer, your “skills” are not yours https://t.co/wAhsNjt5Kz pic.twitter.com/EBvySMQC0P

— Jon Lam #CreateDontScrape (@JonLamArt) December 31, 2023

"I think David Holz is talking a much bigger game than he can support. He’s appeared to be openly brainstorming and spitting out ideas during office hours on Midjourney in the past, but nothing about the technology they’ve demonstrated suggests we’re any closer to ‘holodeck’ technology. Much larger corporations with much more employees and much deeper pockets have been working towards similar goals for much longer, and nowhere near the ‘holodeck’.

"I have no doubt that David has some sort of ‘real-time’ version of Midjourney’s image creation in the pipeline. Whether it’s something similar to video game rendering or something related to VR, it’s called a ‘holodeck’. technology type star trekVery misleading."

Another issue is computing cost. Necessary for generative AI.

"I don’t know if Midjourney has proven profitable yet." As Reed said, "But AI companies like Midjourney need to continue to raise capital to cover R&D and huge server costs, and I personally think David has a vested interest in continuing to troll the hype at all costs."

I asked David Holz for comment on all of this yesterday and will update this post when I hear back.

For my part, all this talk about holodecks misses the fact that there are already thousands of millions of people creating relatively high-quality immersive content on metaverse platforms… and Actually enjoy doing it, and make money doing it.. So holodecks seem like a legally and technically expensive problem when a democratic solution already exists.

As for Reid, follow him on Twitter/X below!

So not only does the technology require copyrighted material to work, but energy demands are increasing (think small countries) and fusion innovations are needed to sustain them. The whole thing is such a joke. https://t.co/VczeiPGj34 pic.twitter.com/yzeZyiwCED

— Reed Southson (@Rahll) January 22, 2024