You're probably aware MIDJOURNEY can serve up apparently copyrighted material, but did you know it can actually do so WITHOUT naming a franchise, character, or actor? Want to know how few words it takes and why that matters? A thread and paper with Gary Marcus 1/10

I've previously demonstrated that Midjourney can recreate extremely accurate film frames by simple prompts alone. 2/10

It can also do games. And like with the Dune example I previously shared, this short prompt for The Last of Us Part II will generate nearly the same frame every time. 3/10

But do you want to know how few words it can take? With just "movie screencap" or "popular movie screencap", it can even give you different franchises in the same grid. 4/10

In fact, just "screencap" will still get you images like these. 5/10

And some of these vaguely prompted images match extremely closely to existing copyrighted material. There are many more examples of this. 6/10

But you don't have to take my word for it, you can try it yourself with the prompts provided. 7/10

Here's a non-comprehensive list of what we were able to find. There's more, but it's a LOT of images to sort through. 8/10

So the question is, do infringing images fall on the end user like Midjourney claims? Can a user be held responsible if Midjourney can serve up copyrighted material or actor's likenesses for profit without a user explicitly asking for it? Why does this matter? 9/10

It seems fairly obvious what Midjourney has trained on to be able to generate these images. Is this legal? Is this really fair use? Who does this affect? Please see our paper for more. 10/10

@GaryMarcus Love all the clowns here tripping over themselves trying to make a damning result less damning. Their defense is child like level understanding of industry, of laws, purposeful misunderstanding of what the tech is and isn’t, and how to even operate it. Anyway excellent work!

@GaryMarcus Thanks Karla! It's not a surprise when their whole understanding is falling apart in real time. Hopefully when the dust settles they'll have a clearer head about it.