In the world of anime and manga, numerous news reports about the misuse of images by artificial intelligence platforms have generated considerable debate. Recently, David Holz, founder of Midjourney, an AI platform based in San Francisco, admitted in an interview that his company extracted approximately 100 million images from the internet, many of them without the proper permission from the official creators.
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According to information from the Petapixel website, Holz revealed in an interview with Forbes that the Midjourney tool uses open datasets available on the internet to train its algorithm.
“It’s just a big download from the internet. We use open datasets that are published and train on them. And I would say it’s something that 100% of people do. We weren’t selective,” he explained.
Holz also stated that Midjourney did not seek the consent of living artists or of works that are still protected by copyright. Holz argues that the lack of a proper method for identifying the copyright of images is one of the main challenges.
“It would be great if the images had embedded metadata about the copyright owner or something like that. But that doesn't exist; there's no record,” he commented.
He also mentioned that Midjourney is exploring a method of exclusion, but highlighted the difficulty in identifying whether a person is truly the artist.
"We haven't found anyone who wants their name removed from the dataset we've been able to find," he added.
Despite the difficulty in proving its authenticity, Midjourney uses works by well-known artists such as Eiichiro Oda, creator of "One Piece," and Masashi Kishimoto, among others. Users of the platform can generate AI art based on the works of these artists, which has generated a wave of controversy.
What did the anime association NAFCA say?
Recently, the anime association NAFCA met with Magmix and the ethical AI developers at Anime Chain. Anime Chain argues that artificial intelligence is inevitable and that creators should lead the way before large tech companies monopolize the field.
This situation raises important questions about artists' rights and the ethical use of artificial intelligence in art creation. Ultimately, it becomes clear that there is a need to find a balance that protects the rights of the original creators.
Source: Forbes