Course Provider Domestika's Midjourney Class Disappoints Real Artists

As tensions between real flesh-and-blood Artists and generative AI devotees continue to escalate, the well-known online learning platform Domestika, in its infinite wisdom, decided to capitalize on the Next Big Thing by unveiling a new course on working with the text-to-image model Midjourney, disappointing its target audience, consisting primarily of Traditional and Digital Artists, in the process.

Over the past few days, the course provider has faced a barrage of criticism from hundreds of individuals on social media, following a publication shared via Domestika's official Twitter page promoting Master Midjourney, a new class teaching the incomprehensibly challenging task of putting words into a text box and pressing the "Generate" button.

While courses on various AIs like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and many others are quite common on other platforms as well, such as Udemy and Skillshare, the situation has garnered particular attention specifically due to Domestika's focus on art-related courses and a large userbase of human artists, who generally aren't too keen on supporting data-scraping, artwork-plagiarizing, jobs-stealing AI developers:

As is often the case, one controversy sparked another when the community scrutinized Domestika's Terms of Use and uncovered a peculiar section 5.2, which, much like Adobe's infamous section 4.2, compels users to grant the platform a "nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license" to essentially do whatever they want with the content users upload to the platform or share with other users or recipients:

Following the outrage, Domestika promptly deleted the tweet and seemingly the course itself from its website, without providing any additional comments on the matter. Despite that, it was pointed out that the platform still hosts a number of gen AI lessons, a fact some view as a solid reason to boycott the platform entirely, at least until such classes are removed:

As of right now, Domestika still hasn't commented on the situation, leaving one to wonder what the company's stance on generative artificial intelligence is.

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