Ethical Stack.

Midjourney Image Editor and Video

Subscription-based cloud image creation and editing, with video tools; visibility defaults and commercial rights depend on plan and context.

Score calculation

(4 + 4 + 3 + 2 + 1 + 8) ÷ 6 = 3.7

6 of six dimensions rated. Unrated dimensions are excluded from the average.

Full scoring method ↗
Setup details

Midjourney Image Editor and Video: cloud access. Subscription plans; commercial ownership requires Pro or Mega for businesses over $1M annual revenue. Ratings describe the stated product, company or configuration in each finding.

What fits your needs

Midjourney hosted image/video generation by subscription; public visibility defaults and plan features apply to generated work.

Tasks

Image generation and editing plus video tools are available through the Midjourney website and Discord; Relax image generation is included on some plans.

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Billing

Plans renew monthly or yearly; included GPU time and Relax availability vary by tier. Subscription features can change.

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Tradeoffs to expect

Privacy

Creations are public by default; Stealth is limited to higher plans and does not hide work made in shared Discord channels.

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Route

Hosted service; no local model weights or offline inference route are offered in the reviewed product sources.

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How to switch

Get started

Create an account on midjourney.com, choose a subscription, and use the Create page; use Stealth settings and avoid shared Discord spaces if visibility matters.

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Practical questions

Age and content boundary

Midjourney terms require age 13+ or local digital-consent age; a guardian must accept if the user cannot consent. Community rules prohibit adult/sexualized imagery, sexualization of minors and harmful manipulation of real people.

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Likeness and deception

Guidelines prohibit harmful imagery of real people and image edits meant to deceive, harass or harm; they also forbid misleading recipients about an image’s nature or source.

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Reporting and labels

Users can report a job/image for moderator review. The reviewed guidelines do not specify universal AI provenance credentials on exported images; public visibility/Stealth controls are separate.

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Commercial use

Users own assets to the extent allowed by law, with Pro/Mega required for businesses over $1M; this does not warrant non-infringement.

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Energy practices

4/10↑

Midjourney publishes training-content information and detailed generation controls, including image quality/draft settings and video batch, resolution, and length. It reports no electricity, emissions, or water footprint.

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Midjourney publishes training-content information and detailed generation controls, including image quality/draft settings and video batch, resolution, and length. It reports no electricity, emissions, or water footprint. The score describes documented measurement transparency and available controls, not environmental performance.

1 + 1 reporting + 0 electricity + 2 controls = 4/10. This grade covers documented practices and transparency; it does not measure the energy or emissions of a request.

No Midjourney company or service electricity-sourcing data, training/inference energy report, or measured footprint per image/video was found. Quality and GPU-time settings are controls, not proof of lower energy per successful result.

Reporting1/3
Midjourney identifies the model/training-content boundary and provides hosted product documentation, but no quantified environmental report or facility/region scope.
Electricity sourcing0/3
No clean-electricity sourcing is established for Midjourney’s hosted generation setup. The product is not a user-routed local inference deployment in the cited docs.
Resource controls2/3
Image controls include model/version, SD/HD resolution, draft mode, quality and repeat; video controls include SD/HD, 1/2/4-video batch size, and extensions up to 21 seconds. These provide several demand controls, but published GPU time/credits are not physical energy measurements.

Water disclosure

Water reporting has not been assessed for this choice.

Training data

4/10↑

Midjourney discloses web-crawled public material, licensed and confidential third-party datasets, user interactions, and synthetic data. It says robots.txt is honored, while leaving individual sources and rights unresolved.

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The EU summary and California disclosure identify useful source categories and crawler controls, but do not enumerate training datasets or establish rights for the broad publicly accessible material. This is a low documented-safeguard score, not a conclusion about legality.

1 + 1 source transparency + 1 permission + 1 creator controls = 4/10. This grades documented training-data safeguards, not a legal ruling.

Specific datasets, partner identities, item-level permissions, and the relative share of licensed versus crawled content are not disclosed.

Source transparency1/3
Source categories, modalities and broad acquisition periods are described, but there is no named-source inventory.
Documented permission1/4
Commercial licenses are reported for some third-party material, while broad crawled content has no itemized rights basis in the disclosure.
Creator controls1/2
The summary reports honoring robots.txt and some privacy processing; it does not show a complete removal or retrospective retraining process.
Data-rights rubric ↗

Your data & privacy

3/10↑

Midjourney says content is public and remixable by default; Stealth is a paid Pro/Mega option, with shared-chat visibility exceptions.

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This score reflects the default cloud community configuration. The current terms also grant Midjourney a broad, continuing content license, and uploads remain visible to people in shared spaces even with Stealth.

Openness

2/10↑

Midjourney provides image and video generation through its hosted subscription service. The reviewed product and terms pages do not offer model weights, source code or a self-hosting option.

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Users can operate the service through its interface but cannot inspect or move the model to their own infrastructure. This places the proprietary hosted product in the low openness range.

Worker protections

1/10↑

Midjourney’s careers pages describe a small distributed company and a separate medical business, but do not provide labor standards, contractor coverage or worker outcomes.

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Midjourney describes a strikingly small, distributed team and roles across infrastructure, product and a separate medical business. The reviewed careers pages do not disclose compensation, benefits beyond Medical full-time roles, data-labeling vendor standards, worker voice, or independent labor outcomes. Its community model and commercial creative contributors are not evidence of paid workforce treatment.

1 + 0 pay & conditions + 0 worker voice & remedy + 0 evidence & follow-through = 1/10. This grades documented worker safeguards, not a measured rate of mistreatment.

Pay, hours, benefits for the main AI product workforce, contractor/labeling arrangements, health and safety, grievance access, supplier coverage and independent outcome assurance remain unclear; no model-maker labor report located.

Pay & conditions0/3
No opened source reports worker pay, hours, exposure protections, contractor coverage, or worker-level outcomes for Midjourney. The reviewed material is limited to The current EU training summary and company page were checked; labor conditions of annotators, moderators, employees, and suppliers remain unreported.; its silence is an information gap, not evidence of poor conditions.
Worker voice & remedy0/3
The reviewed material for Midjourney doesn’t show worker representation, grievance access, bargaining voice, or documented remedies. Public code contributions, customer controls, or creator rights do not demonstrate worker voice across employees and suppliers.
Evidence & follow-through0/3
No reviewed source provides an independent audit or corroborated worker-level outcomes for Midjourney’s relevant employees, contractors, and data-work suppliers. The available disclosures are company/project materials rather than independent labor verification.
Workers rubric ↗

Military ties

8/10Not established↑

Midjourney’s hosted service rules ban violent/inciting content and graphic depictions such as shooting or bombing, but do not prohibit military use as a customer purpose.

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Midjourney’s binding hosted Terms incorporate Community Guidelines that prohibit violent behavior/incitement and gore, including shooting/bombing imagery; moderators can warn, time out, block or ban accounts. These are output/content guardrails, not a military or intelligence-use ban, and no military relationship was established.

7 base + 1 safeguard adjustment = 8/10 (3 of 9 safeguard points; every 3 adds 1). No military relationship was established in the cited sources. This ranks above known defense ties without claiming a verified clean record.

Unpublished contracts, reseller/subcontractor activity, customer-configured use and enforcement outcomes remain unknown. Hosted AUPs do not necessarily apply to independent local deployments or permissively licensed copies.

Use restrictions1/4
Hosted policy prohibits violent/inciting and graphic content, including shooting/bombing depictions, but does not bar non-graphic military, intelligence or surveillance use as such.
Enforcement & oversight1/3
Documented user reporting, automated blocking and moderator warnings/timeouts/bans create a service-level enforcement channel, without independent outcomes.
Relationship disclosure1/2
Public terms and content rules disclose prohibited content and moderation actions, but no government customer/defense-use relationships are identified.

The bounded official review found no named military/intelligence contract or operational use for this company/project. This evidence limit is not a clean bill of health; third-party model-provider relationships and customers’ independent deployments are separate.

Military rubric ↗

BDS targets

Not listed↑

Categorical check of the BNC campaign guide and No Tech campaign page; absence from these named-target pages is not BDS approval.

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No named target for this company was found in the two checked BNC sources as of 2026-10-24. This is a narrow list check, not BDS approval, and it does not capture unlisted relationships or partners.

All sources

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