The success of generative AIs has led to hundreds of deepfakes appearing on the networks, and this is becoming problematic. At least in the eyes of the creators of Midjourney, whose servers are overwhelmed with requests from all over the world.
Midjourney is a conversational chatbot that offers to create illustrations or ultra-realistic photos according to your instructions. If the number of requests that it is possible to send to it is normally limited to 25, many smart people have understood that it is enough to create a new account to reset the counter to zero. As a result, Midjourney has decided to temporarily close access to its free offer.
It was the president of the company, David Holz, who announced the measure on Discord, the messaging system through which you have to go to use the service. He explains that he made this decision “because of the combination of an extraordinary request and abuse in the requests”. The outage will last “until further system enhancements are rolled out.” Since the deployment of its v5, it seems that Midjourney is a victim of its own success.
The multiplication of deepfakes push Midjourney to restrict access to its AI
Pope Francis and his sniper rifle, Barack Obama eats an ice cream with Angela Merkel: you probably did not miss these confusing images of realism that demonstrate the mind-blowing generation capabilities of this AI. The problem is that these images are often misused later, for political propaganda purposes in particular. Worse still, they make it possible to create porn deepfakes, which are totally degrading for the people in the scene.
That said, thePaid subscribers will be able to continue enjoying Midjourney unhindered. They will be happy because the new version of the service is even faster and allows you to create twice as many images in the same amount of time. Paradoxically, therefore, the number of deepfakes is in fact likely to multiply. On Twitter, the implementation of paid certification has led to the appearance of thousands of fake accounts, there is no guarantee that subscribers to Midjourney will not create even more hijackings.