Description
Recently, photos of Pope Francis wearing a puffer jacket and Donald Trump being "arrested" have gone viral on social media. Although the images turned out to be AI-generated, people marveled at their authenticity. These were created in Midjourney, an AI image generator developed by San Francisco-based independent research lab Midjourney Inc, and the company allows users to generate realistic fake images of world leaders, including US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, among others. However, there is one leader whose images cannot be created on the platform: China's Xi Jinping. This was addressed last year by David Holz, co-founder and CEO of Midjourney; However, the question came up again after photos of Pope Francis and Donald Trump surfaced on the internet.
What did the CEO of Midjourney say?
In a Discord post, Holz had attributed the company's decision on Xi Jinping to political satire being "quite at odds" in China.
“We want to minimize the drama… allowing people in China to use our technology would have a greater positive effect on the world than allowing people to satirize Chinese politics. Having a bunch of people trolling this country with our system doesn't help anyone," Holz explained.
Although Midjourney's decision has angered users, with many accusing him of "giving in" to Xi's "wishes", the rule on the Chinese president continues to apply to all users, not just those of the Asian giant.
about halfway through the journey
Founded in San Francisco and launched last July, Midjourney is the brainchild of Holz, who also co-founded Leap Motion. The platform generates images using natural language descriptions called "prompts", also used in DALL-E (OpenAI) and Stable Diffusion (Stability AI).
