With the rise of AI tools that can quickly create altered images and videos, it has become easier than ever to create fake images to spread political misinformation leading up to the upcoming US presidential election. Midjourney's proposed solution could be to ban political images altogether, says Bloomberg. David Holz, CEO of Midjourney, reportedly told users in a Discord chat session that the company was set to ban images such as those of Biden and Trump over the next 12 months.
“I know it's fun to take pictures of Trump — I take pictures of Trump,” he told users who attended the session. “Trump is aesthetically very interesting. But it's probably better not to do it, better to step back a little during this election. We'll see.” As Bloomberg Note, people had already used the company's AI to generate deepfakes of Trump's arrest. The company free trials completed for its AI image generator after those images – as well as those infamous deepfakes of the Pope wearing a Balenciaga-inspired coat – went viral.
Currently, the company already has rules in place prohibiting the creation of “misleading public figures” and “depictions of events” with the “potential to mislead.” Bloomberg However, it was still able to create altered images of Trump covered in spaghetti using the old version of Midjourney's system, while the new version refused to generate altered images of the former president. Of course, even if Midjourney bans images of high-profile politicians, it will only protect its platform from the wrath of critics and becoming the center of attention this election season. This will not prevent the use of AI tools in political disinformation campaigns or the spread of false information intended to manipulate elections as a whole.
Other tech companies have also taken steps to help prevent political misinformation, or at least make it easier to identify. ChatGPT will start soon image tagging created using DALL-E 3, while Meta is work to develop technology that can detect and indicate whether an image, video or audio clip was generated using AI.