Meta will license Midjourney’s AI tech to bring better slop to your feed

Alexandr Wang, the new Chief AI Officer at Meta, announced on Friday afternoon that Meta will license Midjourney’s “aesthetic technology” for future Meta products and models. Midjourney is best known as an AI image generator, though it can also create short videos.

Wang announced the news in a series of posts on X.

“Today we’re proud to announce a partnership with @midjourney, to license their aesthetic technology for our future models and products, bringing beauty to billions,” Wang wrote. “This technical collaboration between our research teams is part of our effort to team up with the best companies in the industry whose work and expertise complements our own. We are incredibly impressed by Midjourney. They have accomplished true feats of technical and aesthetic excellence, and we are thrilled to be working more closely with them.”

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Wang is the new leader of Meta’s AI efforts. The 28-year-old wunderkind is the founder of Scale AI, which Meta recently acquired in a $14.3 billion deal, per CNBC. The acquisition was part of a billion-dollar AI talent spending spree, as Zuckerberg poached engineers, researchers, and executives from rivals like ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

More recently, Meta announced a hiring freeze, part of an internal restructuring of the company’s AI efforts, which Zuckerberg has said will deliver superintelligence to the world — a bold promise.

The partnership with Midjourney is one of Wang’s first big public moves as the company’s first-ever Chief AI Officer.

So far, Meta’s AI image and video generation tools have lagged behind competitors. Like Grok Imagine from xAI, a simple scroll through the Meta AI app will show images and videos that look like the kind of output generated by old models like DALL-E two or three years ago.

In comparison, Midjourney has far more advanced image and video models, which is likely the “aesthetic technology” mentioned in Wang’s statement on X.

AI-generated images and videos from the Midjourney Explore feed.
Credit: Screenshot: Midjourney

The Meta AI app allows users to share images and videos with the world, and it’s full of generic AI slop and apparent intellectual property violations. Midjourney’s feed looks much cleaner and more sophisticated, though the company was recently sued by Disney and Universal for IP infringement, with the suit calling Midjourney a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.”

A typical AI-generated image from Meta AI.
Credit: Screenshot: Meta AI

An AI-generated image of Michael Jackson on a unicorn recently posted to the Meta AI app.
Credit: Screenshot: Meta AI

Earlier this year, Midjourney introduced a new AI video tool, which allows users to easily turn images into short video clips.

By leveraging Midjourney’s latest tools and models, Meta will be able to catch up to rivals like Gemini and ChatGPT.

The partnership is another reminder that Meta’s internal AI technology has a long way to go to achieve the superintelligence predicted by Zuckerberg.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.