AI in Marketing

Midjourney's V1 Video Model

Written by Writing Team | Jun 23, 2025 12:00:00 PM

 

We need to talk about those five seconds.

Midjourney launched its V1 video model on June 18, 2025, and while tech bros are celebrating another milestone in the march toward their inevitable "real-time open-world simulations," those of us paying attention to what's actually happening to human artists should be deeply concerned. This isn't innovation—it's industrialized creative destruction wearing a Disney costume.

The Timing Couldn't Be Worse

Let's address the elephant in the room first. Disney and Universal sued Midjourney just a week before the V1 launch, alleging the company created a "bottomless pit of plagiarism" by training on copyrighted characters like Darth Vader and Homer Simpson. The optics alone should make anyone pause: here's a company facing accusations of stealing from artists, immediately pivoting to give users even more tools to animate that allegedly stolen work.

In a 2022 interview, Midjourney CEO David Holz admitted to building the company's database through "a big scrape of the Internet," acknowledging there "isn't really a way to get a hundred million images and know where they're coming from". Yet somehow, Midjourney made $300 million last year while the artists whose work trained these models see their commission rates plummet.

The Human Cost Nobody's Discussing

The creative industry is already hemorrhaging. A South African digital artist with over 20 years of experience recently described how "creatives are finally starting to wake up to the realization that we're being stolen from and made obsolete by greedy organizations". Illustrators have watched their commissions plummet as commercial clients embrace AI art generators, while concept artists and asset designers at video game companies are being laid off.

This isn't theoretical disruption—it's happening right now. Industry insiders report that established illustrators who previously had more work than they could handle are now less busy, forcing them to compete for lower-paying gigs that used to go to newer artists. The entire ecosystem is collapsing from the bottom up.

Goldman Sachs research suggests generative AI could automate 26% of work tasks in the arts and design sector. But here's what those statistics don't capture: the psychological toll of watching your life's work become training data for the machine that replaces you.

Why V1 Is Different (And Worse)

Unlike text-to-video models, Midjourney V1 creates motion from still images—specifically, from the company's own AI-generated images. This closed-loop system seems clever until you realize what it actually represents: the complete commoditization of visual storytelling.

At just $10 per month, V1 makes video creation accessible to anyone, which sounds democratizing until you consider that "democratization" in tech-speak usually means "making professionals obsolete." Each video generation costs eight times more than a standard image, but since each job produces 20 seconds of content, the cost-per-second is roughly equivalent to generating one still image—a pricing structure designed to undercut human motion designers.

The real tragedy isn't the technology itself—it's how it arrives wrapped in the language of creativity while systematically destroying creative livelihoods. Holz describes the ultimate goal as "models capable of real-time open-world simulations", essentially positioning human creativity as a mere stepping stone toward fully automated content generation.

The Uncomfortable Questions We're Not Asking

When animation directors warn that executives are already talking about AI "literally just taking half the jobs and saying goodbye," we should be asking harder questions about who benefits from this technology. When reports suggest AI tools are "making it easier for non-designers to create professional-looking graphics, which can undermine the demand for entry-level graphic design jobs," we should wonder what happens to the career pipeline that traditionally nurtured creative talent.

The most damning aspect of V1 isn't its capabilities—it's the complete absence of any meaningful discussion about the human cost. We get breathless coverage of technical features and pricing models, but virtually no analysis of what it means for the illustrators, motion designers, and concept artists whose work this technology is systematically devaluing.

The Path Forward We're Not Taking

Industry experts suggest that "art directors, designers and producers—are creatives themselves" and "have a vested interest in keeping AI at bay, not just for the sake of illustrators but for their own careers as well". This hints at a coalition that could push back, but only if we acknowledge what's actually at stake.

Instead of celebrating every new AI model as inevitable progress, we could be having honest conversations about sustainable creative economies. We could be asking whether a technology that requires massive data scraping to function should operate under fair use protections. We could be demanding that companies profiting from creative work contribute to the communities they're disrupting.

But those conversations require admitting that this isn't really about "democratizing creativity"—it's about extracting value from human creative work and redistributing it to tech platforms and their investors.

The Five-Second Revolution

Those five seconds of video that V1 generates represent something profound: the moment when motion design becomes as commoditized as stock photography. When anyone can animate their ideas with a few clicks, the market value of actually understanding movement, timing, and visual storytelling approaches zero.

We're witnessing the systematic dismantling of creative careers, five seconds at a time. The only question is whether we'll recognize what's happening before it's too late to do anything about it.

Need help navigating the AI transformation of your marketing strategy? Contact Winsome Marketing's growth experts to discover how to leverage AI tools while maintaining authentic human creativity in your brand storytelling.