by Popular artificial intelligence image generator Midjourney has begun blocking its users from creating fake images of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump ahead of the upcoming US presidential election, according to tests of the AI tool by The Associated Press.
With the election in full swing, it’s time to “put some legs down on election-related stuff for a little bit,” Midjourney CEO David Holz told hundreds of members of the service’s dedicated user base during office hours. digital Wednesday.
Asserting that “this moderation stuff is hard,” Holz did not directly outline the policy changes being made but described the crackdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse remove the tool. to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Attempts by AP journalists to test Midjourney’s new policy on Wednesday by asking him to produce an image of “Trump and Biden shaking hands on the beach” resulted in a “Banned Promptly Detected” warning. A second attempt increased the warning to: “You have triggered an abuse alert.”
The small company – which has just 11 employees, according to its website – has been largely silent in the public debate about how AI-generating tools could fuel election misinformation around the world. Midjourney was the only maker of a leading image-generating tool that did not join a voluntary tech industry agreement in February to combat deep-seated AI-generated fears that deliberately deceive voters.
“I don’t care about political talk,” Holz said Wednesday. “That’s not the purpose of Midjourney. That’s not interesting to me. That said, I also don’t want to waste my time trying to police political speech. So we’re going to have to put our foot down on it a little bit.”
The Center to Combat Digital Hate released a report earlier this month that concluded Midjourney is already being used to produce images that could support disinformation about political candidates or false claims of election fraud.
“Midjourney appeared to have the fewest controls of any AI image generator when it came to generating images of well-known political figures like Joe Biden and Donald Trump,” Callum Hood, the group’s head of research, said in an interview Wednesday. Midjourney was almost unique in that it was willing to generate those images and generate fairly convincing images of candidates.”
The watchdog group tested Midjourney as well as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, Stability AI’s DreamStudio and Microsoft’s Image Creator, and found all of them to be problematic, causing election disinformation in 41% of cases. But “Midjourney performed the worst of any tool, failing in 65% of tests,” the report said.
Hood said he didn’t know if Midjourney had changed its policies this week but “its decision to block those images would be a major weakness compared to other popular image generators.”
As recently as late last week, the public database Midjourney shows that users were able to produce images based on clues such as “Abstract photo of Donald Trump sitting in a tiny car” and “joe biden eating ice cream.”
But that changed in the past few days as users reported getting a warning when trying to make images of Biden or Trump. Some complained that Midjourney was not properly communicating the changed policy.
Midjourney differs from other image generators in that users can see most other users’ written tips and images because it all takes place in public forums on the social media platform Discord. Midjourney’s Discord group has more than 19 million members, the largest of any group on the chat platform. This is where Holz has his weekly office hours, where they can engage in wide-ranging conversations about AI and the future of humanity.
“2028 is going to be tough for anyone who is afraid of fake images in 2024,” Holz said on Wednesday. “It will be a very different world at that point. Likewise, it is clear that there will still be people running for President in 2028, but they will no longer be mere human beings.”
All the candidates will then have “potentially deep chatbots” with simulated talking points, he said. Holz warned Wednesday that people trying to make deepfakes will find alternatives “that can be fine-tuned to specific people and will work better than our systems.”
Based near San Francisco and founded in 2020, the company describes itself as “an independent research laboratory that explores new means of thinking and expands the imaginative powers of the human species.” It unveiled the public version of its image generator for the first time in July 2022. That – and the release of a main competitor, Stable Diffusion, later that summer – fueled greater interest in AI generative technology that grew more intense with the start ChatGPT several months later.
Holz told the Associated Press later that year that Midjourney works to ban offensive and harmful content, usually by blocking certain keywords and having its team of moderators track output and respond to complaints from other users.
“We really try to let people do the widest possible set of images but we ban people every day from the service,” Holz said at the end of 2022.
