The artificial intelligence image-generator Midjourney has started blocking its users from creating fake images of President Biden and former President Donald Trump ahead of the presidential campaign in November, according to tests of the AI tool by the AP. With the election in full swing, it's time to "put some foots down on election-related stuff for a bit," Midjourney CEO David Holz told several hundred members of the service's devoted userbase in a digital office hours event Wednesday. Declaring that "this moderation stuff is kind of hard," Holz didn't specify exactly what policy changes were being made but described the clampdown as a temporary measure to make it harder for people to abuse the tool.
Attempts by AP journalists to test Midjourney's new policy on Wednesday by asking it to make an image of "Trump and Biden shaking hands at the beach" led to a "Banned Prompt Detected" warning. A second attempt escalated the warning to: "You have triggered an abuse alert." The tiny company—which has just 11 employees, according to its website—has largely kept silent in the public debate over how generative AI tools could fuel election misinformation. Midjourney was the only maker of a leading image-generating tool that didn't join a voluntary tech industry pact in February to combat AI-generated deepfakes that deliberately trick voters, per the AP.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate released a report 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 seemed to have the fewest controls of any AI image-generator when it came to generating images of well-known political figures," said Callum Hood, the group's head of research. "Midjourney was almost unique in both being willing to generate those images and generating quite 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 had problems, creating election disinformation in 41% of cases. But "Midjourney performed worst of any tool, failing in 65% of test runs," the report said.
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