Midjourney and the Ethics of AI Art

> AI Warning: This post was initially generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT. I've made some tweaks here and there but I still feel the need to disclose that this post was initially generated using AI. Using AI to generate a post about AI, how droll, I know.

🧠 Midjourney, Creativity, and the Slippery Slope

In 2023, I spent some time testing Midjourney — not out of enthusiasm, but out of necessity. I wanted to understand how it worked, what it was capable of, and where it might fit into the creative workflows increasingly being invaded by AI.

What I found was, frankly, unnerving.

The tool itself is powerful. Shockingly so. Type in a vague prompt — "serene cliffside in a Studio Ghibli style with golden light" — and within seconds, Midjourney produces what looks like the output of a seasoned concept artist. It’s polished, convincing, and very consistent.

And that’s the problem.

🤖 The Danger Isn’t Just in What It Can Do — But in How

Tools like Midjourney don’t “understand” style or composition. They reproduce patterns. Those patterns are built from data — scraped from the work of thousands of artists, many of whom never consented to having their art fed into a model designed to make them obsolete.

What Midjourney does, in plain terms, is approximate human creativity using statistical theft. It amalgamates the work of living, breathing creators — many of whom have poured years into developing their craft — and spits out a stylistic average tailored to the untrained eye.

To the casual observer, it’s “magic.” To those who understand the craft, it’s exploitation.

⚠️ The Ethical Tension

I don’t believe AI is evil. I work with AI in various contexts and see its potential — especially in productivity, accessibility, and automation. But when it crosses into creative labour, into fields where expression and identity are core to the work, I find it harder to look the other way.

Artists are now being asked to compete with a machine trained on their own output, for lower rates, tighter deadlines, and fewer credits. Many won't win that race. Not because their work isn’t good, but because companies don’t value good — they value cheap.

💬 So Why Use It at All?

Because ignoring it doesn’t make it go away.

Testing Midjourney didn’t change my ethical stance — it reaffirmed it. But it did help me understand the appeal, the power, and the trajectory. If I’m going to argue against blind adoption, I have to understand what people are buying into. And it’s easy to see why they do.

Midjourney is attractive. There's an obvious demand for a system that costs nothing or almost nothing and produces something decently approximating whatever you ask for. With newer models I've tried in 2025 I've found that even asking for words or geometric patterns (something I couldn't do back in 2022/23) will work with a good degree of success. People who wouldn't have the money to commission an artist can now suddenly get something "decent" for free or mere pence. But that's not the real cost...

💰 What's the Cost?

Artists around the world have had their art stolen. I don't just mean legally, I'm sure some overpaid suit could argue for weeks on end about whether or not it's legal to take a person's portfolio of artwork, the aggregate sum of hundreds of hours of labour, and feed it into a machine designed to do the same job as them for far less money. I mean stolen in the sense that the artwork they created has been taken without their consent for it to be used in the way it's currently being used.

When all this AI hype kicked off, we as a global society didn't have the laws or guardrails in place to sufficiently guard against this sort of global-scale digital theft. Companies like OpenAI have exploited this and taken every bit of art they can get their hands on and fed it into "Theft Machine 4.o". Do you think the thousands of artists whose work was taken without their consent are credited anywhere? No. Their work has been taken, fed into a machine designed that, while impressive is essentially approximating off of what it has seen. It's not "creating" so much as layering a bunch of other people's art on top of each other and merging them, using its knowledge of what art loks like to make it appear coherent.

🧭 Where Do We Go From Here?

We need to draw hard lines between augmentation and replacement. Between tools that empower creators, and tools that exploit them to simulate creativity without compensation. If people are going to have their labour stolen; if people are going to be able to work for hours, days, lifetimes and have their work taken without their consent to power a machine designed to erase their livelihood and, to some, create a mockery of their profession they should have the option to withdraw their consent from this

"But Glenn, the AI doesn't copy the images. It learns patterns and generates novel outputs. You wouldn’t say a student artist is stealing when they study hundreds of paintings in art school and then paint something in that style, would you?"

No, I wouldn't. I'd also say that in most cases the artist has consented to having their work studied and the student doesn't directly copy their style, they use the art they study to influence them. Furthermore, a single student will study dozens of artists in their career, maybe hundreds. An AI model can ingest the complete works of tens of thousands of artists in days. I'd also add that whereas humans learn and study, taking in what they see to shape and grow their approaches and styles, an AI model simply averages, not to mention an AI never attributes where it drew inspiration from.

"The AI transforms the original work. That’s what the law cares about. Fair use doesn’t require consent. And the output isn’t just a copy-paste — it’s something new. The model doesn't retain the art; it just learns from it."

Transformation is not a moral get-out-of-jail-free card. Transformation without consent or compensation still results in harm — especially when the transformation destroys the market for the original creators. Artists aren’t just losing theoretical rights — they’re losing work, commissions, and visibility to systems that were built on their labour without permission. Imagine building a house from stolen bricks. Sure, it’s a new house. But those bricks weren’t yours.

"Even if it’s imperfect now, this is where the world is heading. You’re trying to hold back a tide. Would you have banned the printing press because it put scribes out of work?"

Ahh the classic. If I had a penny every time I got called a luddite I'd be richer than the corporations making fat stacks off of global scale art theft. Technological progress that destroys entire career paths should not be welcomed blindly, especially when that progress was built on extracted labour. The printing press democratised access to knowledge. AI image generators centralise power in companies who can now commodify creativity (if we're calling it that).

So, ultimately, am I okay with building a world where art becomes a median output, not a human expression? Where we replace the soul and passion and spiritual with the mechanical and precise and averaged?

For me, the answer is no, absolutely not.