Dripped out Pope Francis and Trump under arrest—the era of difficult to detect AI-generated images is here. But really, the company just wants you to pay.
Where does the fun stop and the societal harm begin? Artificial intelligence companies behind image and text generators seem to be grappling with that question in real-time, as their products gain traction across the internet. Simultaneously, the same companies are also running up against some very standard internet issues—like users angling to take advantage of free trial offers.
Popular AI image generator, Midjourney, halted its free trial access this week, as first reported by the . The announcement came in a Tuesday morning Discord post from Midjourney CEO, David Holz citing “extraordinary demand and trial abuse.”
According to a follow-up post, Holz and co tried to address the issues of abuse with safety patches. However, the attempted changes weren’t enough to fix the problems. “We tried turning trials back on again with new safeties for abuse but they didn’t seem to be sufficient..we are turning it back off again,” the CEO posted Wednesday afternoon. The company’s paid service remains available and while the free trials remain paused for now, they could come back at any time.
Though the report initially insinuated that the “abuse” in question was related to a recent slew of viral deepfakes, the company denies that account. “There were some pretty big misunderstandings in the [WaPo] article,” Holz wrote to Gizmodo in an email. “We stopped trials because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images…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,” he added.
The “new safeties” referenced in the Wednesday Discord post? According to Holz, this, too, was about trying to limit users to one free trial each. “We’re still trying to figure out how to bring free trials back, we tried to require an active email but that wasn’t enough so we’re back to the drawing board,” he said to Gizmodo.
Thanks to the recent generative AI boom, the use of image generators to create deepfakes are having a moment.
