Experts from all walks of life have been warning of the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to create flawed images and videos for years. In its early days, deepfaking was fairly easy to distinguish, but with recent advances and because of the dangers of misinformation it poses, the “open bar” that was Midjourney and its deepfaking services had to be shut down (deepfakes) online.
We know the rapid advancement of AI, especially in ChatGPT-4. But the new version 5 of Midjourney’s deep faking software has dramatically improved the quality of images depicting people.
For example, misshapen hands, which used to be a feature of AI-generated images, are now less of an issue. Lighting and fabrics are also more realistic, and the system is capable of generating images of countless celebrities and public figures for TheVerge to read.
These improvements have resulted in a number of midjourney shots going viral in recent weeks. These include not only fake photos of Trump’s arrest and the fashionable Pope, but also French President Emmanuel Macron marching through the ongoing protests in Paris and Elon Musk holding the hand of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Montage of three fake photos implying the Pope, Elon Musk, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Donald Trump.
Full enforcement of moderation policies
Midjourney’s content restrictions are more permissive than some competing services (like OpenAI’s DALL-E) but more restrictive than others (e.g. Stable Diffusion).
Additionally, Midjourney’s response to the escalating politically sensitive threat of fake images has been piecemeal thus far, without significant overhauls to its moderation policies.
There is actually a banned words list based on complaints from users from some countries, but almost nobody pays any attention to it. Even simpler: until recently, using other terms was enough to get the desired deepfaking results.
- Hear Martin Bouchard, President and Co-Founder of QScale, on the mic mario dumont, Available as a podcast on QUB radio :
too much abuse
Currently, non-paying users can no longer generate images, with Midjourney claiming a shortage of GPUs. Then the tech hinted that the misuse of the software was the main reason for stopping the free trials.
However, the service remains open to paying subscribers.