Midjourney, an artificial intelligence (AI) service that generates images from natural language descriptions, recently banned the making of pictures of Chinese President Xi Jinping, much to the dismay of its users. However, the ban has not deterred its users from finding a workaround by creating deepfakes of Xi, which are manipulated digital representations produced by sophisticated machine-learning techniques.
Last week, Midjourney took action to prevent the proliferation of deepfakes on its platform by disabling access to its free trial version. Although the platform still allows the creation of images featuring world leaders, the Chinese President is notably excluded. Any attempt to generate an image with his likeness or even mention his name in a prompt is strictly prohibited by Midjourney.