Hood didn't know if Midjourney changed its policy this week, but “its decision to block those images would help seal a major weakness compared to other popular image generators.”
Midjourney's public database indicates users created photographs for themes including “Abstract photo of Donald Trump sitting in a tiny electric car” and “joe biden eating ice cream” late last week.
This changed in recent days when users reported receiving a warning when making Biden or Trump photos. Midjourney was criticized for not conveying the policy change.
Because it happens on public Discord boards, Midjourney allows users to see most other users' textual prompts and images, unlike other image-generators. Midjourney's Discord group has over 19 million members, the most on the network. Holz organizes weekly office hours there, when AI and humanity's future can be discussed.
Anybody who’s scared about fake images in 2024 will have a hard 2028,” Holz warned Wednesday. It will be a different world then. No doubt, humans will run for president in 2028, but they won't be human anymore.”
He said all candidates will have real-looking “deepfake chatbots” with artificial talking points. Holz warned Wednesday that true deepfake makers will find alternatives that “can be fine tuned on specific people and will work better than our systems.
Established in 2020 near San Francisco, the company promotes itself as a “independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.” July 2022 saw the public debut of its image-generator. That and the release of a crucial rival, Stable Diffusion, later that summer stimulated interest in generative AI technology, which heightened with ChatGPT several months later.
Holz told The Associated Press later that year that Midjourney blocks keywords and has moderators track outputs and respond to user complaints to ban offensive and harmful content. Holz remarked in late 2022, “We really try to let people make the broadest set of images possible but we do ban people every day from the service.”
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