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Midjourney quiets down politics

March 19, 2024
Scott Nover
​U.S. President Joe Biden walks across the stage to sign an Executive Order about Artificial Intelligence in the East Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., October 30, 2023.
U.S. President Joe Biden walks across the stage to sign an Executive Order about Artificial Intelligence in the East Room at the White House in Washington, U.S., October 30, 2023.
REUTERS/Leah Millis

Everything is political for GZERO, but AI image generator Midjourney would rather avoid the drama. The company has begun blocking the creation of images featuring President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the run-up to the US presidential election in November.

“I don’t really care about political speech,” said Midjourney CEO David Holz in an event with users last week. “That’s not the purpose of Midjourney. It’s not that interesting to me. That said, I also don’t want to spend all of my time trying to police political speech. So we’re going to have to put our foot down on it a bit.”

Holz’s statement comes just weeks after the Center for Countering Digital Hate issued a report showing it was able to use popular AI image generators to create election disinformation in 41% of its attempts. Midjourney performed worst out of all of the tools the group tested with researchers able to generate these images 65% of the time.

Examples included images of Joe Biden sick in a hospital bed, Donald Trump in a jail cell, and a box of thrown-out ballots in a dumpster. GZERO tried to generate a simple image of Biden and Trump shaking hands and received an error message: “Sorry! Our AI moderator thinks this prompt is probably against our community standards.”

For Midjourney, it seems like they simply don’t want to be in the business of policing what political speech is acceptable and what isn’t — so they’re taking the easy way out and turning the nozzle off entirely. OpenAI’s tools have long been hesitant to wade into political waters, and stark criticism has come for Microsoft and Google for their sensitivity failures about historical accuracy and offensive imagery. Why would Midjourney take that risk?

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