Can Midjourney’s CEO Stop a Storm of Fake Election Images?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Dotted around the internet are a multitude of silly images of Donald Trump. Here he is as a superhero, there he is as a cartoon warrior, and here he is playing basketball with a young Michael Jordan. The glossy look gives away these are AI-generated, but there's no denying the underlying message: Trump holds on to a kind of online cultural power and is still weirdly beloved. 

The messenger is Midjourney, a San Francisco-based AI startup that in its 17-month existence has carried out no marketing, raised not a cent from venture capitalists, but is making $200 million in annual revenue and has become one of the most powerful tools for generating remarkably real AI “photos.” Fake snaps of Trump getting arrested and Pope Francis in a white puffer jacket confused internet users and went viral earlier this year, and were generated on Midjourney. The company has now released a new version that can do this with even more realism.

Having previously insisted that he doesn't like fake photos, Midjourney founder David Holz finds himself steering a tool created for artists that's also being exploited by propagandists. That's the trajectory of a kind of classic AI innovator, one who couldn't resist making their system more powerful at the price of their own standards. (Midjourney did not respond to multiple requests for comment or for an interview with Holz.)

Holz grew up in Florida where he carried out advanced science experiments as a kid — shooting paper airplanes at 160 mph down a homemade wind tunnel, for example — before juggling interests in design and math in higher education. He co-founded Leap Motion in 2008, a startup that made a USB device the size of an iPod that allowed you to control a computer program with hand gestures.