Midjourney’s founder, David Holz, says it’s banning these phrases as a stopgap measure to stop individuals from producing surprising or gory content material whereas the corporate “improves issues on the AI facet.” Holz says moderators watch how phrases are getting used and what sorts of photos are being generated, and alter the bans periodically. The agency has a neighborhood tips web page that lists the kind of content material it blocks on this means, together with sexual imagery, gore, and even the 🍑 emoji, which is commonly used as a logo for the buttocks.
AI fashions resembling Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Secure Diffusion are skilled on billions of photos which have been scraped from the web. Analysis by a crew on the College of Washington has discovered that such fashions be taught biases that sexually objectify girls, that are then mirrored within the photos they produce. The huge measurement of the info set makes it nearly inconceivable to take away undesirable photos, resembling these of a sexual or violent nature, or those who may produce biased outcomes. The extra typically one thing seems within the information set, the stronger the connection the AI mannequin makes, which implies it’s extra more likely to seem in photos the mannequin generates.
Midjourney’s phrase bans are a piecemeal try to handle this drawback. Some phrases referring to the male reproductive system, resembling “sperm” and “testicles,” are blocked too, however the checklist of banned phrases appears to skew predominantly feminine.
The immediate ban was first noticed by Julia Rockwell, a scientific information analyst at Datafy Scientific, and her good friend Madeline Keenen, a cell biologist on the College of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Rockwell used Midjourney to attempt to generate a enjoyable picture of the placenta for Keenen, who research them. To her shock, Rockwell discovered that utilizing “placenta” as a immediate was banned. She then began experimenting with different phrases associated to the human reproductive system, and located the identical.
Nonetheless, the pair additionally confirmed the way it’s potential to work round these bans to create sexualized photos through the use of completely different spellings of phrases, or different euphemisms for sexual or gory content material.
In findings they shared with MIT Know-how Overview, they discovered that the immediate “gynaecological examination”—utilizing the British spelling—generated some deeply creepy photos: considered one of two bare girls in a physician’s workplace, and one other of a bald three-limbed particular person slicing up their very own abdomen.
JULIA ROCKWELL
Midjourney’s crude banning of prompts referring to reproductive biology highlights how difficult it’s to reasonable content material round generative AI techniques. It additionally demonstrates how the tendency for AI techniques to sexualize girls extends all the way in which to their inner organs, says Rockwell.
