David Holz

David Holz is a serial inventor who did applied-math research connected to NASA and the Max Planck Institute before co-founding the hand-tracking company Leap Motion in 2010. In 2021 he started Midjourney as a small self-funded research lab; when its image generator opened to the public through Discord in mid-2022, it became the defining tool of the AI-art explosion.

The imagination engine and the artists it enraged

Holz frames Midjourney in humanist terms — not a replacement for artists but “an engine for the imagination,” a way to expand the imaginative powers of the human species. The same year, he told Forbes plainly that Midjourney’s training data was scraped from the internet and that no consent was sought from living artists, because there “isn’t really a way” to trace a hundred million images to their owners. That candor became Exhibit A for the backlash: a Midjourney-made picture won the 2022 Colorado State Fair art prize, and in 2023 artists including Karla Ortiz named Midjourney as a defendant in their landmark copyright class action.

The legal siege widened in June 2025 when Disney and NBCUniversal sued Midjourney — Hollywood’s first major studio suit against a generative-AI company — accusing it of functioning as a “bottomless pit of plagiarism.” Holz, characteristically, has kept shipping: Midjourney remains independent, profitable, and unfunded by outside investors, and has expanded into video generation.