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David Holz’s central argument in The Verge’s 2022 interview was simple but ambitious: Midjourney should not merely automate picture-making. It should act as an “engine for the imagination”—a tool that helps people turn ideas into images, experiment rapidly, and create together.
That vision captured something important about early text-to-image systems: they lowered the distance between having a visual concept and expressing it. But the interview also belongs firmly to its moment. Since it was published, Midjourney has expanded from its early Discord-centered image generator, while questions about privacy, commercial use, training data, copyright, moderation, and synthetic media have become considerably more complicated.
What the interview was about
James Vincent’s interview with David Holz was published by The Verge on August 2, 2022, under the headline “An engine for the imagination”: the rise of AI image generators. The article was later marked as last published on February 16, 2024.
It appeared at a pivotal point. Text-to-image systems were moving out of research environments and into public use, making it possible for people to describe an image in ordinary language and receive a set of generated results. The attraction was obvious: someone without drawing, painting, 3D, or photographic skills could begin exploring a visual idea almost immediately.
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The controversy was just as obvious. These systems raised questions about whether artists’ work had been used in training, who owned generated images, how bias entered the results, how synthetic images might be used for misinformation, and whether professional creative work would be reduced to a cheaper automated service.
Holz’s answers were notably optimistic. He presented Midjourney less as a replacement for artists than as a new kind of imaginative instrument. The interview is therefore useful not only as a historical account of Midjourney’s early rise, but also as a statement of the philosophy its founder wanted attached to the technology.
Who is David Holz?
Holz described himself as a serial entrepreneur with a background in physics and mathematics. He said he had worked on a fluid-mechanics PhD while working with NASA and the Max Planck Institute. He later founded Leap Motion, a company focused on hand-motion capture and gestural interfaces, before leaving after approximately 12 years to establish Midjourney. Those details come from Holz’s account in the original interview and should be understood as biographical context rather than as a complete corporate history.
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In 2022, Holz described Midjourney as a small research lab of roughly 10 people. He said it had no investors and that he did not feel immediate pressure to sell the company or take it public. Rather than describing Midjourney as a conventional venture-backed software business, he portrayed it as a long-term place for projects involving reflection, imagination, and coordination.
That self-description helps explain why the interview repeatedly returned to questions of creativity and social interaction. Midjourney was being presented not simply as an application that produced an output, but as an environment in which people could explore what visual computing might become.
A separate Forbes interview published in September 2022 likewise described Midjourney as an applied research lab that made products. It also recorded Holz’s preference for “founder” over “CEO.” That distinction matters because the original title supplied for this article calls him CEO, while the contemporary coverage more often identifies him as Midjourney’s founder.
“An engine for the imagination”
Holz’s defining claim was that Midjourney was not fundamentally about making art or manufacturing deepfakes. He described it as a way to expand human imaginative power. His comparison was technological rather than artistic: faster vehicles did not eliminate walking, so computers becoming better at visual imagination would not necessarily eliminate human imagination.
The analogy expresses a particular division of labor. The machine supplies rapid visual generation and variation. The human supplies intention, goals, judgment, meaning, and direction. A model may produce an image that looks coherent, surprising, or beautiful, but it does not automatically know why the image should exist, what story it belongs to, or which of several possibilities best serves a project.
In this sense, the phrase “engine for the imagination” is more than a slogan. It is a design philosophy based on augmentation. Midjourney lowers the barrier between an idea and a visual artifact, allowing people who cannot draw or paint conventionally to externalize a concept. It also lets experienced artists explore composition, color, atmosphere, costume, architecture, or environments at a speed that would be difficult through manual production alone.
That is Holz’s stated vision, not a settled finding about the social effects of generative imagery. The same reduction in friction that helps one person visualize an idea can also make it easier to produce derivative, misleading, harmful, or legally contested material. The tool’s usefulness depends heavily on the human decisions surrounding the prompt, selection, editing, attribution, and distribution of the result.
Why Midjourney began with Discord
One of the interview’s most important product decisions was Midjourney’s use of Discord. Holz said users did not merely want an application that accepted a prompt and returned a private image. They wanted to make things together. Using an existing social platform also avoided the difficulty of constructing a separate social network from the ground up.
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In the early Midjourney environment, users worked in shared Discord rooms where they could see other people’s prompts and results. A person might begin with a basic idea, while another user noticed a possibility in the output and developed it in a new direction. The surrounding community became part of the creative interface.
Holz called this process “augmented imagination.” The important point was not only that the model generated images quickly. It was that users could learn the system’s possibilities by watching other users work. The community functioned as a live gallery, tutorial, prompt laboratory, and source of variations.
This arrangement also created an unavoidable trade-off. The Verge reported that early free use placed generated images in public chatrooms, while paid access offered higher limits and, depending on the plan, privacy. Public visibility helped people discover what the system could do, but it was not appropriate for every client brief, unreleased concept, personal image, or commercial project.
Midjourney’s current documentation shows that the product is no longer limited to that original pattern. Subscribers can create through both the website and Discord, and Midjourney documents privacy controls including Stealth Mode and private workflows. The precise availability and behavior of those controls can depend on the plan and current product rules, so users should consult the official comparison of web and Discord creation before treating a workflow as private.
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The contrast between 2022 and the current product is significant. The original interview describes an early public expansion built around still images, shared Discord rooms, and a relatively small lab. Current Midjourney documentation describes access through both its website and Discord, four subscription tiers—Basic, Standard, Pro, and Mega—and a service whose terms also cover an image editor and a video model.
The current Terms of Service are marked effective May 27, 2026. Midjourney’s plans documentation also says subscriptions renew automatically on a monthly or yearly basis unless canceled and outlines plan-specific image and video usage limits. Because plan features and limits can change, readers should verify the current documentation rather than rely on the historical pricing or free-credit arrangements discussed in 2022.
This development supports part of Holz’s original argument: Midjourney did not remain a novelty confined to one public chat interface. It became a broader creative product. It does not, however, prove every forecast made in the interview. Product expansion is not the same thing as the arrival of fully generative games, real-time dream worlds, or any particular technical milestone.
The forecasts: 30 frames per second and “games are dreams”
Holz made two especially striking predictions in the interview.
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Second, he imagined that within a decade consumers might buy game consoles containing large AI processors in which “all the games are dreams.” In that model, games would not be fixed collections of prebuilt assets. Their environments could be generated and reshaped in response to a player’s imagination.
These should be read as 2022 forecasts, not as descriptions of achieved outcomes. The current Midjourney documentation does show expansion into editing and video-related tools, but it does not establish that Holz’s specific real-time, high-resolution, 30-frames-per-second prediction—or his fully generative-console vision—has been realized. The technical direction and the social consequences remain separate questions.
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Was the creativity in the model or in the community?
Holz argued that shared generation could produce new visual aesthetics. He did not describe these as purely machine-created styles. Instead, he presented them as human aesthetics accelerated by a machine-mediated community.
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For painters and other visual artists, this is perhaps the most productive way to understand the “engine” metaphor. The generator is not the entire creative practice. It is one stage in a chain that can include research, sketching, prompting, selection, paint-over, compositing, color correction, editing, art direction, and presentation.
It is also why the social design mattered. If users only received isolated outputs, they would have less opportunity to discover unfamiliar approaches. In a community, one person’s experiment becomes another person’s starting point. The resulting aesthetic is shaped by both the model’s training and the users’ shared habits.
Moderation, deepfakes, and harmful imagery
The interview did not ignore the risks. Holz said that public attribution and visibility could discourage some abuse because users’ names were attached to their creations. He also acknowledged the weakness of that protection: people could pay for privacy and attempt to create shocking or harmful images for distribution elsewhere.
In 2022, he said Midjourney banned words associated with extreme gore and related content. When asked about realistic faces and misinformation, he said the system could generate celebrity faces but that its default artistic style made it difficult at that time to produce convincing photographic deepfakes. He also conceded that persistent users might discover combinations of prompts that generated more realistic results.
That is historical evidence about the system’s state in 2022. It should not be turned into a current guarantee that realistic synthetic media is difficult to make, or that moderation reliably prevents harmful use. Image-generation capabilities, interfaces, policies, and evasion techniques change.
Current Midjourney documentation provides ways to report violating images and describes community guidelines and privacy-related controls. The company’s current boundaries should be checked directly before making claims about a particular prohibited prompt, enforcement rate, or safety outcome. The current web-creation documentation is a better source for present-day reporting and workflow details than a 2022 interview.
What Midjourney could mean for professional artists
Holz argued that Midjourney could be useful to professional artists during concept development. Clients and stakeholders often do not know exactly what they want at the beginning of a project. Rapidly producing and comparing visual directions could help a team converge on a mood, composition, setting, or design language before committing to a more expensive production process.
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He also suggested that artists could use the system to compensate for weaknesses. A painter who struggles with backgrounds, color, or composition might use generated references or ideas as part of an exploratory workflow. An art director could use it to communicate a direction more quickly. A designer could use it to produce a wide range of rough possibilities before selecting one to refine manually.
Holz rejected the assumption that lowering the cost of an individual image would automatically destroy the market for artists. His prediction was more conditional: some organizations would use AI to reduce costs, while others would use it to pursue more ambitious, sophisticated, diverse, or higher-quality work.
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That remains an argument rather than a guarantee. A tool can expand what one artist is able to attempt while also reducing demand for certain kinds of commissioned work, changing rates, altering credit practices, or shifting creative control toward clients and platforms. The effect depends on the market, the workflow, the quality threshold, and whether the human contribution is recognized and paid.
For a working artist, the practical question is therefore not simply “Can this make an image?” It is:
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- What part of the process is being accelerated?
- What original work, editing, or direction does the artist contribute?
- Does the client permit generated material?
- Can the source and rights of reference material be documented?
- Will the final image be used privately, commercially, or as part of a larger product?
- Does the workflow expose confidential concepts or client information?
Commercial use: current terms are not the same as copyright law
Holz said in the 2022 Forbes interview that Midjourney’s license permitted commercial use, while companies with more than $1 million in annual revenue were expected to purchase a corporate license. Midjourney’s current documentation provides a more specific and materially updated framework.
According to the current commercial-use guidance, users own the images and videos they create, even after canceling a subscription, subject to the Terms of Service and applicable law. It also says that companies grossing more than $1 million per year need a Pro or Mega plan to use creations commercially for the company. The current plans documentation lists Basic, Standard, Pro, and Mega tiers.
There are three important qualifications.
- Contractual ownership is not the same as copyrightability. A service’s terms can state what rights it grants or recognizes between the user and the service. They do not by themselves determine whether a particular jurisdiction grants copyright protection to material generated with limited human authorship.
- Ownership does not erase third-party rights. A generated image may still raise issues involving recognizable people, trademarks, characters, copyrighted works, privacy, publicity, or contractual restrictions.
- Terms can change. Anyone using Midjourney for client work should read the applicable terms and plan rules at the time of creation and distribution, not rely on a 2022 summary.
For a painter or studio, a sensible record-keeping practice is to preserve the prompt history, source references, edits, compositing steps, and human decisions that shaped the final work. This is not a substitute for legal advice, but it can clarify the creative process and help identify which parts of a project require additional permission or review.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Training data and the copyright dispute
The most difficult issue in the interview concerns how generative systems are trained. Holz told Forbes that Midjourney trained on large datasets scraped from the internet and did not seek consent from living artists or copyright holders for the images used in training. He said the company was considering opt-out mechanisms but described authentication and attribution as difficult.
Those remarks were controversial in 2022 and have become more consequential since then. In June 2025, Disney and Universal sued Midjourney in federal court, alleging that the system generated unauthorized copies of protected characters and works. The Associated Press report described allegations involving characters including Darth Vader and the Minions.
Warner Bros. Discovery filed a separate copyright lawsuit in September 2025, according to TV Technology. The existence of these cases does not establish that every allegation will succeed. They are legal claims, not adjudicated findings, and their outcome must be distinguished from Midjourney’s contractual terms and from Holz’s personal predictions.
The careful conclusion is narrower: Holz described Midjourney’s training practices and mission in 2022; subsequent litigation has challenged aspects of generative-AI training and output practices; and the legal status of those claims remains separate from the company’s statement about what users own under its current terms.
Holz’s “water” analogy for regulation
When asked about regulation, Holz compared AI to water. Water can be dangerous, he argued, but it is also essential. The goal should therefore include making sure the “water” is clean, rather than banning water itself.
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1Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors2Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute3Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problemsThe analogy captures his preference for regulating harmful applications and outcomes instead of prohibiting the underlying technology. It is useful as a summary of Holz’s philosophy, especially his belief that generative tools could produce substantial benefits alongside substantial risks.
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It should not be treated as a legal or policy recommendation endorsed by regulators. The analogy leaves open many questions: who defines “clean,” how provenance is established, which uses require consent, how platforms should respond to abuse, and how responsibility should be divided among model developers, users, distributors, and institutions.
What the interview got right—and what it could not answer
The interview got several things right about the appeal of generative imagery. It recognized that the technology’s most immediate power was not only automated production, but rapid iteration. It understood that community could be part of the interface. And it identified a genuine accessibility benefit: people with strong ideas but limited conventional image-making skills could explore those ideas visually.
It also correctly anticipated that the technology would become a site of conflict over professional practice, misinformation, privacy, copyright, and ownership. Those concerns were not peripheral to the product; they were built into the question of what it means to generate an image from a prompt.
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What the interview could not settle was whether augmentation would dominate replacement, whether artists would share in the value created, whether public creativity would coexist with privacy, or whether the legal system would accept the training and output practices of image models. Those questions require evidence beyond a founder’s optimism.
The most durable reading of “engine for the imagination” is therefore neither a promise that AI will liberate every artist nor a claim that human creativity has become irrelevant. It is a description of a new interface between intention and image. The interface can expand a painter’s possibilities, but the surrounding choices—whose work trained it, whose likeness appears in the result, who receives credit, who bears the risk, and how the image is used—remain human and institutional questions.
Using the interview’s ideas responsibly today
Readers who want to experiment with Midjourney or similar tools should treat the 2022 interview as historical context, not as a current user manual. Before using generated material in a real project:
- Check the current terms and plan. Confirm the commercial-use rules, privacy features, renewal conditions, and any image or video limits that apply to your account.
- Decide whether the work needs privacy. Public generation can expose prompts and outputs. Use the documented private or Stealth workflow when appropriate, and do not place confidential client information into a public environment.
- Separate inspiration from imitation. Avoid treating a living artist’s name as a shortcut for copying a recognizable style, and review outputs for protected characters, logos, identifiable people, or close reproductions.
- Keep a process record. Save prompts, references, edits, compositing work, and human interventions. This helps with attribution, client communication, and later rights questions.
- Review before publishing. Check hands, text, faces, anatomy, cultural symbols, factual details, and unintended similarities. A generated image is not automatically accurate or safe because it looks polished.
- Disclose where appropriate. Clients, collaborators, publishers, and audiences may have different expectations about generated material. Agree on those expectations before delivery.
Further reading and experimentation
For readers who want a practical introduction to the workflow discussed here, a third-party Midjourney AI art guide or AI image-generation guide can be a useful companion for learning prompts, iteration, and image-editing techniques. Such a book or manual should be treated as independent educational material—not as an official Midjourney publication and not as an endorsement by David Holz.
For current product rules, the most reliable sources remain Midjourney’s own commercial-use documentation, plan comparison, Terms of Service, and guidance for web versus Discord creation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Was David Holz the CEO of Midjourney?
The supplied title uses “CEO,” but contemporary coverage more often identified Holz as Midjourney’s founder. In a 2022 Forbes interview, Holz said he preferred “founder” to “CEO,” so “founder” is the more precise description for this interview’s context.
Is Midjourney still based on Discord?
No longer exclusively. Current Midjourney documentation says subscribers can create through both the website and Discord. The early Discord community remains important to understanding the product’s original social design, but current access, privacy controls, and features should be checked in the official documentation.
Can Midjourney images and videos be used commercially?
Midjourney’s current commercial-use guidance says users own the images and videos they create, subject to its Terms of Service and applicable law. It also states that companies grossing more than $1 million per year need a Pro or Mega plan for commercial company use. This contractual position is not the same as a guarantee of copyright protection or freedom from third-party rights claims.
Did Midjourney’s 2022 deepfake assessment remain true?
It should not be treated as current. Holz said in 2022 that the system’s default artistic style made convincing photographic deepfakes difficult, while acknowledging that persistent users might find ways to produce more realistic results. Models, interfaces, and moderation policies change, so that statement is historical.
What does “an engine for the imagination” mean?
It describes Holz’s view that AI should augment human creativity rather than replace human intention. The system generates and varies images, while people provide goals, meaning, narrative, judgment, and direction. It is a founder’s design philosophy, not an established conclusion about all social or economic effects of generative AI.
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Holz’s 2022 phrase remains a compelling description of why image generators became so powerful: they make visual experimentation faster and more accessible. But the machine is only one part of the creative system. The current reality also includes privacy choices, commercial restrictions, uncertain copyright questions, moderation challenges, and lawsuits alleging infringement. Midjourney may be an engine for imagination, but people still determine what that engine is used to imagine—and what happens when the images leave the screen.
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