It also comes as Midjourney — considered by many early AI adopters to be the highest quality, “gold standard” of AI text-to-image generation and AI image editing — faces increasing competition from the likes of Elon Musk’s xAI and its Grok 2 chatbot (powered by Black Forest Labs’ Flux.1 AI model) and the new Ideogram 2 image generator launched today.

It’s also facing a lawsuit from artists who accuse it of violating their copyright by training on copyrighted works without permission or compensation.