Trump, the Pope and Yoda: the rise of Midjourney’s fake images

Isaac Stanley-Becker and Drew Harwell say rapid advances in technology and few rules have allowed the tiny company to make the most of the wild frontier of AI image generation

Jason Allen used Midjourney to create ‘Théâtre D’opéra Spatial’, which won first place in the ‘digitally manipulated photography’ category at the Colorado State Fair’s fine arts competition in 2022 (Mikayla Whitmore/Washington Post)

The AI image generator Midjourney has quickly become one of the internet’s most eye-catching tools, creating realistic-looking fake visuals of former president Donald Trump being arrested and Pope Francis wearing a stylish coat, with the aim of “expanding the imaginative powers of the human species”.

But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin and other world leaders – but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.

“We just want to minimise drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in China is pretty not okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”