The former president of the United States donald trump assured last week that New York authorities were planning arrest him in relation to the investigation into the alleged payment of $130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign. Five days later, the Manhattan district attorney has not made any arrests and it is unknown if they will, although media as The New York Times have noted this possibility, but the case has already had an unexpected effect on users of artificial intelligence. midjourney.
Eliot Higgins He is a journalist, founder of the Bewlincat medium, who, following the controversy surrounding the possible arrest, decided to spend some time in Midjourney recreating how it could take place. Midjourney is a text-to-image language model where the user enters a text description of the image they want and the AI creates it. The result, in some cases, can become photorealistic.
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 20, 2023
With this tool, Higgins created a series of about fifty images in which he not only fabled What would an arrest of Trump on the streets of New York be like being reduced by the police?but also showed the reaction of his relativesthe trial, his passage through the jail and a later drain which ended with Donald Trump eating in a macdonaldsreleased again.
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 20, 2023
“They formed a kind of narrative, I thought it was really funny and I put it there (on Twitter). I didn’t mean to make any clever criticism or anything like that. But later took on a life of its own”, the journalist explained to Buzzfeed.news.
The thread with the images went viral on Twitter, where some have been viewed almost 5 million times, and received echo in various American media. The images created by Higgins with Midjourney are not perfect, but they do have of sufficient quality to pass for truthful in certain formats or in front of users who do not even know that there are image-generating tools like Midjourney. Following this repercussion, Midjourney has taken some steps to prevent a repeat.
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 21, 2023
Higgins found this Wednesday that Midjourney had revoked his access to the platform and the users with which had prohibited the use of the word “arrested” in the prompts or descriptions that they introduce “I already suspected I was pushing my luck too much when I made the thread, let alone when it went viral,” Higgins says.
—Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) March 21, 2023
What has most caught the attention of the journalist in this situation is “the number of people who are unaware of Midjourney’s existence or what it is capable of” and believes that his case “has a positive impact on the perception of the type of images that can now be faked”.
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