You may never need another stock photography photo ever.
Not only can you create nearly anything you can imagine- you can easily find and use similar MidJourney work that others have created. Here's how.
Licensing & Copyright of Midjourney Art
AI copyright law is an evolving area.
Currently, AI-generated imagery can NOT be copyrighted, which means it is effectively in the public domain.
However, Midjourney's terms suggest that commercial use (including sale) of its AI-generated works requires a paid Midjourney account.
Free accounts can generate and access artwork, but can only use it under a creative commons non-commercial CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
Using the Midjourney Art of Others
So what does this mean if you have a paid account, but want to use imagery you've found that someone else created?
It's a gray area. It is effectively in the public domain as it's not copyrightable, but you might be in violation of Midjourney's ToS depending on how you interpret it.
In our entirely non-legal opinion;
For commercial use, the best practice would be to have a paid MJ account, and create a variation of any image you want to use so that it's properly linked to your own account and covered by MJ's commercial use license.
That ensures you're in line with both current copyright law ( Apr 2023 ) and MJ's ToS.
References
- AI-Created Images Aren’t Protected By Copyright Law According To U.S. Copyright Office ( Forbes )
- Who owns AI generated art work? ( r/midjourney )
- Article "AI Authorship?" by a law professor (2020) ( r/bigsleep )
- Can Midjourney Images Be Used Commercially? Midjourney License Explained
Additional Perspectives
- A.I. Is Going to Destroy the Stock Photography Market (And It's Coming For Your Porn Too!) ( Andy Hutchinson )
Other AI Image Generation Models
Imagen, DALL-E 2, Parti, eDiffi, Stable Diffusion are other models.
Some handle text well. Currently the only one I know of is DeepFloyd IF which is free and open source, however the license appears to forbid sharing any content for commercial use.
