Midjourney couldn't handle the "abuse"
Midjourney has recently rolled out its newest model, named V5, and its capabilities mesmerized lots of people. Yesterday, the company announced that it has killed the free AI image generator access due to an influx of new users.
People from all over the world wanted to use Midjourney's image generator after seeing the latest model's capabilities. “We think the culprit was probably a viral how-to video in china,” said Holz over email. “This happened at the same time as a temporary GPU shortage. The two things came together, and it was bringing down the service for paid users,” said David Holz, the company CEO, in an email to The Verge.
Deepfake images have taken over the internet
Recently, deepfake images of Donald Trump being arrested or Pope Francis wearing a super-stylish white puffer jacket has been all over the internet. Most people share these for fun, but they might also bring harm to different communities or people. Even though people can recognize the authenticity of most, there are some very realistic ones that could easily trick people.
At first, it was thought that Midjourney killed its free AI image generator to prevent the deepfake image flood. However, the company CEO revealed that none of the free users had access to Midjourney V5, so the reason behind killing the free tool is not related to deepfake images.
TikTok has also taken action against deepfake content and updated its content policies due to growing concerns. People were using AI voice cloning tools to imitate public figures and say transphobic or homophobic statements, which have often been mistaken for authentic footage.
Midjourney V5 is the company's latest model, which carries insane features, like more realistic and quality images, while using natural language prompts. In the future, Midjourney might want to take precautions against deepfake content. The technology will eventually get to a better point, and once it reaches a bigger audience, it might get harder to control everything or differentiate deepfake from authentic.
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Who the hell needs Midjourney when you could do it free and fully offline with Stability AI?
That garbage doesn’t work offline. They don’t even have a downloads link! No normal human being can use that garbage.
“[…] it was bringing down the service for paid users,”
So, they did not separate the paid and free tiers of their service.
I’ve seen other AI services that have a queue for the free version so it does not overload their servers.