After fake news photos went viral online, it is now impossible to generate images of Xi Jinping with the generative AI Midjourney.
In recent days, false images of ex-President Donald Trump manhandled in a demonstration, the pope in a trendy white down jacket, Joe Biden dressed up as a clown or even Emmanuel Macron as a garbage collector had gone around the web. All had been generated by the Midjourney artificial intelligence.
Since then, American journalist Eliot Higgins, who started the trend, has been banned from the software. Midjourney has also ended its free trials.
But not all leaders are entitled to the same treatment. For example, if you try to fabricate an image of Xi Jinping or the Chinese president, you most likely won’t succeed the first time. Midjourney simply banned their creation.
“Avoid Drama”
The stated goal: “Avoid drama”, says the CEO of Midjourney, in a message on the Discord platform, relayed by the Washington Post, “because political satire in China is rather frowned upon”. The company could simply fear legal repercussions, while it remains a small structure, as suggested 01Net.
These fake shots can also be used for political and propaganda purposes, while it is still very complicated to distinguish a real shot from an image from an AI.
“The images are becoming more and more realistic and the tools more and more powerful”, concedes the founder of Midjourney. He says he is working to better detect “objectionable behavior” in the use of his AI, without giving more details. The software already does not allow images that are too violent and texts that are “inherently disrespectful, aggressive or otherwise abusive”.
If few limitations are put in place by its competitor Stable Diffusion, the generative AI Dall-E for its part prohibits representing politicians or major geopolitical events currently in progress.
In the case of Midjourney, this censorship does not go down well with its users, who have already found ways to circumvent it by using other words to describe the Chinese president. A guide posted on a Taiwanese site even details comment “se moquer” de Xi Jinping thanks to AI.
