Can Midjourney’s CEO Stop a Storm of Fake Election Images?
David Holz built a tool for human imagination. What happens if that turns into a propaganda engine in 2024?
Midjourney founder David Holz at Leap Motion's headquarters in 2016.
Photographer: GLENN CHAPMAN/AFPDotted 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.