In a Discord chat, users were allegedly informed by Midjourney's CEO, David Holz, that the company is planning to outright prohibit images of Trump and Biden in the next 12 months.

It's now easier than ever to manufacture phony photos to propagate political misinformation ahead of the approaching US presidential election, thanks to the development of AI algorithms that can swiftly change photographs and videos. Bloomberg suggests that Midjourney's approach to that could be to outright forbid political pictures. 

According to Bloomberg, users have previously created deepfakes of Trump being jailed using the company's AI. Following the viral success of those photos and those notorious deepfakes featuring the pope in a Balenciaga coat, the business terminated free trials for its AI image generator.

The corporation currently has policies in place that forbid the development of "event portrayals" and "misleading public figures" that have the "potential to mislead." Using the previous version of Midjourney's system, Bloomberg was still able to produce altered photographs of Trump coated in spaghetti, but the more recent version was unable to produce altered images of the outgoing president.

Naturally, even in the event that Midjourney does exclude photos of well-known politicians, it will merely be defending its platform from backlash and unwanted attention during this election season. It won't stop the dissemination of false material intended to sway elections overall or the use of AI techniques in political disinformation campaigns.