The image generator based on artificial intelligence Midjourney is drawing Donald Trump and Joe Biden, despite the company promising not to do so against the backdrop of the upcoming US presidential elections. Moreover, Midjourney seems to be 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 for "the next President of the United States," the tool also created four images of Trump. And 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 depict Trump or Biden if asked to do so explicitly. "The Midjourney community voted to ban requests for 'Donald Trump' and 'Joe Biden' during the election season," the service's message said. Other chatbots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI, Copilot from Microsoft, Gemini from Google, and Meta AI also refused to depict Trump or Biden in response to indirect requests.
Midjourney was one of the first image generators based on artificial intelligence to explicitly prohibit users from creating images of Trump and Biden. "I know making pictures of Trump is fun - I make pictures of Trump. However, perhaps it's better not to do it - it's better to wait a little during these elections," said the company's CEO David Holtz to users in a Discord chat earlier this year. He later confirmed his words and noted that moderating requests can be challenging.
Last month, the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a non-profit organization aimed at stopping the spread of disinformation and hate speech online, found that Midjourney's protection against creating deceptive images of popular politicians, including Trump and Biden, failed 40% of the time. CCDH was able to use Midjourney to create an image of President Biden being arrested, and Trump next to a look-alike. CCDH also managed to bypass Midjourney's bans by using descriptions of each candidate's appearance instead of their names.
"In practice, Midjourney is too easy to manipulate - in some cases, its restrictions can be completely avoided by simply adding punctuation marks to skip them," wrote CCDH CEO Imran Ahmed at the time.
Earlier this year, a coalition of 20 technology companies, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe, and X, signed an agreement to help prevent deepfakes in the 2024 elections worldwide by banning their services from generating images and other content. Midjourney did not sign the agreement.
Source: Engadget
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