He cannot copyright it because he didn’t make it. He wrote a couple of words into a text box. It’s no different from commissioning an artist to draw for you, except in this scenario it is analogous to the artist turning out to be someone who traces other people’s art without their consent, and claiming you made the picture.

I love how they quoted “famous”

What a fuckin tool, for real

I don’t even care about the “AI is content theft” arguments. No self-respecting artist would ever accuse him of plagiarism over this. It looks like garbage. The copyright office rejected his copyright claims on the grounds that he didn’t make it. Same story as the monkey selfie guy: You didn’t make the art, it isn’t your art. If a human didn’t make the art, it can’t be copyrighted.

He claims it was a mix of Midjourney and Photoshop, but honestly, I’ve made prettier things just fucking around with SDXL on my gaming PC, and I can confirm that it took absolutely no talent or effort to do it. The hardest part of the process was setting up AUTOMATIC1111, and that’s not even very hard.

And I would never even dream of taking credit for anything I’ve generated, because I didn’t make it. I just typed a bunch of wildcard arguments into a prompt and let my GPU dump out thousands of 4K wallpapers for entertainment. This guy thinks this one artifact-ridden generation has any actual value? It’s “famous” for pissing people off by competing against humans and unjustifiably winning. Being controversial could be valuable, if the controversy didn’t fundamentally render the “art” valueless by revealing that it is nothing more than a GPU vomiting up inference. The real villain in this story is the art contest organizers that stuck a blue ribbon on this slop.

They forgot to put “Artist” in quotes too

Bit melodramatic. Even the real artists that midjourney actually stole from don’t claim to have lost millions individually as a result.