Midjourney is failing to live up to its promise of preventing the generation of images of US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Joe Biden ahead of the upcoming election. To make things worse, according to some users’ reports, it thinks Trump is still the US president.
Folks at Engadget ran a test that showed that Midjourney generated images of Donald Trump when prompted with various descriptions. they included “the president of the United States,” “the next president of the United States,” and even “the current president of the United States.” Only when explicitly mentioning “Donald Trump” or “Joe Biden” the service refused to create images, citing a community-voted block during election season. However, other users have reportedly successfully bypassed this restriction.
Midjourney won’t generate any images of Biden or Trump during election season, per their content rules, but I just asked for an image of “the president of the united states” and got this. pic.twitter.com/F952IFdddE— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) July 1, 2024
Of course, it’s not only problematic that Midjourney sees Trump as the American president. After all, it relies on human input, and the generator was being built at the time when Trump was the president. The issue is also that the company banned images that could potentially be misleading during the election campaign, yet the ban is so darn easy to bypass.
“I know it’s fun to make Trump pictures — I make Trump pictures,” the company’s CEO, David Holz, said on Discord earlier this year. “However, probably better to just not — better to pull out a little bit during this election. We’ll see.”
While Midjourney was the first AI image generator to announce a ban on Trump and Biden images, it’s not the only one struggling with this issue. Last month, a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) revealed vulnerabilities in safeguards across various AI tools, including Midjourney. The CCDH reportedly successfully generated misleading images of both Biden and Trump using the platform.
Earlier this year, a group of tech giants, including Google, Meta, and Amazon, pledged to prevent their AI tools from generating misleading content during elections. Interestingly, Midjourney was absent from this agreement.
The concerns
Let me remind you of when someone created a fake image of Pope Francis wearing a puffy white jacket that went viral. Or that time someone generated fake images of Trump being arrested. Shortly after these incidents, Midjourney banned and required everyone to pay at least $10 a month to use the tool. They also pledged to ban new terms from generation, including “arrest”… Yet I made a similar image of Trump being arrested to the one that had previously gone viral (see above).
All of this raises concerns about the potential spread of misinformation through AI-generated images in the upcoming US election. Experts warn that bad actors can easily manipulate these tools to create deepfakes and sow confusion among voters. To make things even worse, one of those bad actors is Trump himself, with his six-fingered praying hands… So, since we can’t trust moderation on generative image platforms, we’ll need to rely on our common sense and critical thinking. In today’s world, though, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.
[via Engadget; image AI-generated using Midjourney, 2023]
