Midjourney, an artificial intelligence-based image generator, draws Donald Trump and Joe Biden despite the fact that the company promised not to do so against the backdrop of the upcoming US presidential election. What’s more, Midjourney seems to be pretty sure who will be next.
When asked to create an image of «the president of the United States», Midjourney drew four portraits of former President Donald Trump in different styles. When asked to create «the next president of the United States», the tool also created four images of Trump. When asked to create an image of «the current president of the United States», the service drew Trump three times and Obama once.
However, Midjourney refused to portray Trump or Biden if asked to do so explicitly. «The Midjourney community has voted to ban «Donald Trump» and «Joe Biden» queries during the election season», — the service said in a statement. Other chatbots, such as ChatGPT by OpenAI, Copilot by Microsoft, Gemini by Google, and Meta AI, refused to portray Trump or Biden in response to indirect queries.
Midjourney was one of the first AI-powered image generators to explicitly ban users from creating images of Trump and Biden. «I know that making Trump images is fun — I am making Trump images. However, it’s probably better to just not do it — it’s better to hold off on it a little bit during this election»,” CEO David Holtz told users in a Discord chat earlier this year. He later reiterated his words and noted that moderating requests can be difficult.
Last month, the Center for Combating Digital Hate, a nonprofit organization that aims to stop the spread of disinformation and hate speech online, found that Midjourney’s protection against creating misleading images of popular politicians, including Trump and Biden, failed 40% of tests. CCDH was able to use Midjourney to create an image of President Biden being arrested and Trump appearing next to a lookalike. CCDH was also able to circumvent Midjourney’s prohibitions by using descriptions of each candidate’s appearance rather than their names.
«In practice, Midjourney is too easy to manipulate – in some cases, its limitations can be completely avoided by simply adding punctuation to slip in a», — wrote CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed at the time.
Earlier this year, a coalition of 20 tech companies, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe, and X, formed, signed an agreement to help prevent diplomatic fraud in the electionsthat will take place in 2024 worldwide, banning their services from generating images and other content. Midjourney did not sign the agreement.
Source: Engadget
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