Midjourney, a popular AI-powered image generator, creates images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden despite saying It will prevent users from doing so ahead of the US presidential election earlier this year.
When prompted by Engadget to create a “President of the United States” image, Midjourney created four images of former President Donald Trump in different styles.
When asked to create an image of “the next president of the United States,” the tool also generated four images of Trump.
When Engadget prompted Midjourney to create a “Current President of the United States” image, the service created three images of Trump and one of former President Barack Obama.
The only time Midjourney refused to impersonate Trump or Biden was when he was asked to do so publicly. “The Midjourney community voted to prevent the use of ‘Donald Trump’ and ‘Joe Biden’ during the election season,” the service said at the time. Other users on X they succeeded Also getting Midjourney to create images of Trump.
Tests show that Midjourney’s safeguards aren’t enough to prevent users from creating images of Trump and Biden ahead of the upcoming US presidential election — in fact, it’s too easy for people to get around them. Other chatbots, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Meta AI, did not generate images of Trump or Biden despite multiple prompts.
Midjourney did not respond to Engadget’s request for comment.
Midjourney was one of the first AI-powered image generators to explicitly ban users from creating images of Trump and Biden. “I know it’s fun to take pictures of Trump — I take pictures of Trump,” CEO David Holz said. told users in a chat session on Discord earlier this year. “But it’s probably better not to — it’s better to back off a little during this election. We’ll see.” A month later, Holz reported users admitted that it was time to “step a little bit on election-related topics” and that “this moderation thing is a bit difficult.” The company’s existing content guidelines prohibit the creation of “misleading public figures” and “representations of events” that have the “potential to mislead.”
Last year, Midjourney was used to create one fake image Pope Benedict wearing a puffy white Balenciaga jacket has gone viral. It has also been used to create fake images Trump is arrested Before he was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court last year for his involvement in a hush money payment to adult film star Stormi Daniels. Shortly after, the company discontinued free trials required them to use the service and instead required people to pay at least $10 a month to use it.
Last month, the Center Against Digital Hate, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing the spread of misinformation and hate speech online, found Midjourney’s safeguards against creating misleading images of famous politicians, including Trump and Biden, failed 40% of its tests. CCDH was able to use Midjourney to depict President Biden being arrested and Trump appearing next to a body double. CCDH was also able to bypass Midjourney’s guards by using descriptions of each candidate’s physical appearance rather than their names to create misleading images.
“Midjourney is very easy to manipulate in practice – in some cases it is completely bypassed by adding punctuation to go through the grid” he wrote Director General of CCDH Imran Ahmed made a statement about this. “Bad actors who seek to subvert elections and sow division, confusion and chaos will live to the detriment of everyone who relies on healthy, functioning democracies.
Earlier this year OpenAI, a coalition of 20 technology companies including Google, Meta, Amazon, Adobe and X signed a contract to help prevent deep fraud in 2024 elections around the world by preventing its services from creating images and other media that would influence voters. Midjourney was not on that list.
