Midjourney just banned this man after shocking fake AI images of politicians go viral

Midjourney, the popular generative AI program, was used to create fake images of politicians and the user is now banned from the platform itself.

Midjourney can be used to create images from natural language descriptions, called prompts. (Representative Image) (Unsplash)

Over the past few months, there have been several contentious debates about the ills and benefits of artificial intelligence (AI), with AI researchers and experts even claiming that it could bring about humanity's extinction if we're not careful. The spread of misinformation has been one of the hot topics, with cases related to AI "hallucinations" and Deepfakes causing controversy. Recently, Midjourney, the popular generative AI program, was used to create fake images of politicians that were shocking. They quickly went viral and the user has now been banned from the platform itself.

Fake images created using Midjourney

For the unaware, Midjourney is a generative AI platform created by a San Francisco-based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Like OpenAI's DALL-E and BigSleep's Imagen, it generates images from natural language descriptions, called prompts. Justin Brown, a video editor, used prompts to generate fake AI photos of famous politicians, according to a report by Futurism.

In a Twitter post, Brown wrote, “I got banned from Midjourney AI for generating realistic images of politicians cheating on their wives for a series called “AI will revolutionize the blackmail industry”.

The fake images include several political personalities that are part of the US 2024 presidential race such as POTUS Joe Biden, former POTUS Donald Trump, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, as well as other personalities such as former Vice President Mike Pence, Minority Leader of United States Senate Mitch McConnell and United States Senator Bernie Sanders.

Reddit ban

While Midjourney allowed these fake images to be generated via its platform, the user was soon banned after he posted them on Reddit - the images were also removed from this platform. In a conversation with PetaPixel, Brown said, “After gaining some traction on Reddit, the series was removed by moderators and the Midjourney ban followed almost immediately.”

While the series was created to show how AI technology can easily become a weapon, Brown notes that the fake images have been misused and shared out of context.