Legal & ethical aspects of using DALL-E, Midjourney, & Stable Diffusion

Kate Koidan
5 min readMar 29, 2023
Generated with Midjourney by ArtMyko

In my previous two posts, I have been looking into the terms and conditions of various stock image sites and art marketplaces to discover their position on AI art. But what about AI image generators themselves?

Today, I want to compare major AI image generators — DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion — with regard to their legal, ethical, and financial approaches:

  • Who built the AI model?
  • How much does it cost to generate images with this tool?
  • What images have been used for training?
  • What are the in-built restrictions on generated content?
  • Can you sell the images you generated?

Of course, these three tools also differ in terms of their performance, strengths, and weaknesses, but let’s leave the creative part for another time.

DALL-E 2

Who: DALL-E 2 was introduced by OpenAI, one of the leading AI research and deployment companies, which is also behind ChatGPT. OpenAI was co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015, but he resigned from OpenAI’s board in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his AI-related work at Tesla. Recently, OpenAI has been actively cooperating with Microsoft, which gets priority access to all of…

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