From Bloomberg
Midjourney Weighs Banning Trump, Biden Images Before US Election
By Rachel Metz
With Midjourney, you can quickly create vivid AI-generated imagesof almost anything, including fake pictures of President Joe Biden grinning while firing a machine gun and former President Donald Trump meeting Pope Francis in the Oval Office. But that may soon change as the US election season gets underway.
Midjourney is considering banning people from using its artificial intelligence software to make political images over the next year — and, in particular, pictures of Biden and Trump — in an effort to avoid winding up at the center of the US presidential election...
Even if Midjourney does prohibit users from making images containing specific political figures, it would be “at best a Band-Aid” solution, according to Hany Farid, a digital forensics expert and professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Let’s not pretend that banning images of Biden and Trump in Midjourney is going to solve the much, much larger problem we have of political disinformation,” he said. People will always find their way around safeguards put in place by platforms offering AI-generated content, Farid said...
Hany Farid is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences and the School of Information at UC Berkeley and a senior advisor to the Counter Extremism Project.
