@Sfwmson @david @mikemc303 Can we agree that if you walk into an artist’s gallery, surreptitiously photograph their work, then later print them on canvas and claim them as your own work, that’s plagiarism?

That’s the process that MidJourney and others have used. They didn’t ask the artists their software “trained on” if that was acceptable, nor do those artists receive any payment for that use.

The analogy you want to use isn’t something that MidJourney et. al. can do. IF you could teach MidJourney what “impressionism” means, to the point where the software could produce an image of “waterlillies on a pond, in an impressionist style”, and the software wasn’t simply pulling up saved works of Renoir, Monet, etc and then tweaking & blending them, then I’d say your analogy is fair.

I just want people to understand where MidJourney et. al. “art” comes from. It comes from the literal plagiarism of human artists, not some deep understanding of what art “is”.