AI's Unveiling: Exposing Political Misconduct with MidJourney

0:00Today on the podcast we're going to be talking about a massive new feature that dropped from Mid-journey we'll be talking about what people are currently using it for and we're also going to talk about a big controversy that midjourney just got caught up in why they are banning some people's accounts and what's happening there so without further ado let's jump into it so yesterday midjourney tweeted they said we're releasing the pan feature today click the new arrow buttons under your upscaler to extend the image in that direction type slash settings and click remix mode to change your prompts every time you pan keep panning over and over and craft epic panoramic stories have fun so what this means and what's actually happening here is midjourney recently released a zoom out feature on midjourney where essentially allowed you to zoom out of your image but the problem with this that a lot of people noted was the fact that when midjourney generates an image it has a set dimensions and it's usually a square image that they generate and it's kind of set dimensions that it has.

0:55And so when you zoom out of that image, the new zoomed out image was the same dimension. So it wasn't like you're getting a bigger image or more kind of area around it. And so with this new pan feature, you're actually able to get a bigger or a higher quality image, right? It's actually generating new content next to it. And so I think this is going to be really impressive. You're able to essentially extend your images up, down, left, or right by clicking on an arrow so you might have an image of you know a family standing under a tree and then you would say you know extend right and it could fill in what would be on the right hand side this is called in painting and this is something that photoshop currently does and so i think that mid journey is you know making sure they're keeping up with photoshop and they're adding that functionality now i think um a couple details about this number one clicking an arrow will extend an image in that direction and I think one of the big things that are included in this new update is what's called remix mode so by selecting remix mode it's actually allowing you to change your prompt when you extend your image so you know going back to that example as family photo under a tree rather than just saying you know extend the image to the right and auto fill it in with whatever the AI thinks should be placed there which sometimes could be weird sometimes could be crazy or sometimes could be bland you can actually change your prompt and say you know extend it to the right but add a boat you know in the ocean and make it a cloudy day and all of a sudden in that extension it adds whatever you've told it to do and it all kind of fits with the same image and the same vibe and it's really really impressive so I think what's what is a really cool feature as well with this is that you can pan multiple times on the same image so that gives you the ability to keep generating an image that is longer and longer.

2:41Like let's say you want to go tall, you can make really tall images or you can make really wide images, which people are like, well, why do you need really wide images? Well, one of the things that a lot of people use their phones for is panoramic images, right? So you take your phone, you go to panoramic mode, you spin in a full circle, and it's essentially taking a picture of everything in a 360 view around you. So essentially now you're able to recreate panoramic images with this new feature where you can just keep extending something and create a panoramic image which eventually could be used for making 360 images which when we're talking about you know the the age of VR and AI and AR that's coming upon us this would be really cool to be able to make 3D scenes for different VR experiences now 360 and you know like all up and down and all around you is a whole another question so it'd be interested to see if they really send any features that are able to do that but as is you're able to make really impressive panoramic images so that someone could you know wearing a VR headset spin in a full circle and see your image all the way around them which is really impressive and I think it's the first step to really making these really powerful kind of surround sound or surround ai experiences in vr okay so i want to talk about a couple things that people are saying on twitter and a couple projects that people are currently using this for to give you some ideas of what some of the implications of this new update are so well the first thing i will say a couple people have mentioned that they're getting some kind of odd results with it um and mid journey has replied saying that they might be having bugs with their niji journey so just to try the regular model if you're having issues i would recommend doing that but in any case, I've seen someone create a really impressive, it's a, it's a artistic painting with the Statue of Liberty in the middle and they expanded it so the canvas is bigger, it looks really cool.

4:31There was someone that, you know, they had a picture of a bunch of soldiers in the streets of Berlin, black and white photo, looks like it's from World War II. They, you know, expanded to the right and all of a sudden added an entire building and a street with cars on it to the right, so it kind of adds extra, you know, context to images. Now, a really cool feature that I've seen someone use this for or use case is they said that you can add characters to an image by panning and adding character descriptions to the prompt so essentially they had a character for a movie or a video game or something right that it's a person generated by mid journey in a specific style they panned to the right and gave it a bunch of prompts to add another person and it's added a whole nother character to this scene that is in the exact same style the same type of clothes and same time era and it fits really well um so you know it would be really a really interesting way to add a whole series of characters that are all kind of the same vibe and same theme using a tool like this which I think is really interesting.

5:25Someone else used it for a really interesting use case where essentially they got it to create what they call the impossible building. Essentially they just kept getting it to pan up and up and up and create pretty much a skyscraper but every single level was like a new style so the bottom level is like kind of this like Israeli stone brick building. The second style is a gothic cathedral, and the third style looks like a French palace, and the fourth style looks like, you know, Brooklyn brick building, kind of like skyscraper building, and the next one is this really crazy wave blue, like abstract facade for building, and then the top one has like people standing on top of the building, and it's kind of like crazy impossible looking skyscraper, but you can do all sorts of really, really interesting and unique things with this so I think this is going to be really exciting someone also made a um they made a giant kind of panoramic of this futuristic kind of city um it's very long goes in all directions and I think this is going to be really impressive as I mentioned before for doing these kind of 360 degree views that you might want to do on something like a VR headset um there's been a lot of other really interesting use cases okay one thing that I did notice that I thought was kind of interesting someone said he created a high res well essentially you can do high res on these two so that's um what everyone is like drooling over it's the fact that the images aren't just you know generating a more zoomed out but same quality image or same yeah dimension images you're actually being able to make this thing higher and higher quality so this guy he he made a image of himself he's in the middle of a poppy field and there's a sunset in the background and mountains and i'm assuming the picture is probably just a close-up of him himself and he's expanded this out to have this really scenic view all around him.

7:13And he did say in full disclosure, he extended a little bit further in Photoshop, but the core was all created in mid journey. So I think something that this really makes me think of is there was a controversy a few years ago where essentially there was an influencer who was grabbing pictures off of these free websites like Unsplash or Pexels, right? Where you can get images copyright for free. And he was Photoshopping himself into them and posting them on Instagram. And then when people found out that he was just photoshopping his pictures is like this big scandal and lost a lot of like brand sponsorships and stuff like that so i thought that was kind of interesting because i believe nowadays we're going to be seeing the same thing except it's going to be influencers just using ai to literally recreate their images or to just enhance their images and so it'll be interesting to see if people have the same kind of outrage or if at this point it's so um you know everyone is using it and everyone's doing it so it's not really going to be you know that much of a shocker to anyone i think that'll be really interesting and then it you know brings up a lot of questions about you know the the reality of these images you know I've known in the past there's been a lot of controversies with like models for example how much they're airbrushed and photoshopped and you know people talk about unrealistic beauty standards and things like that and essentially this AI is now generating images that are picture perfect you have no blemishes you have no whatever a lot of people criticize the body types that it gives to everyone in these kind of AI generated images so it'll be really interesting to see where that conversation goes with tools like this as well as I absolutely believe this is going to be a game changer for influencers and uh by game changer I mean they're going to adopt it at a very high level and continue to use it so I think this is going to be really interesting one other interesting um use case that I did see someone use it for they were combining mid-journey's uh pan and zoom features And essentially it starts up with a closeup of a girl in a street.

9:05It zooms way out. And all of a sudden that zoomed out image of a street is a girl holding a sign with that picture on it. And then it pans up. And all of a sudden there's like this girl towering over her morphed with a skyscraper. And then it pans to the right. And there's another like massive person. And it's like and then they animated this whole thing and turn it into a video. Or essentially it's just automatically zooming out and stuff and doing all this. I think people are gonna be able to make all sorts of incredibly crazy interesting creative things. and what really got me thinking was the fact that they kind of animated this whole thing so it's automatically panning out you can make some pretty impressive video this will get very close to video right because essentially you're creating multiple scenes next to each other so you could just have a camera essentially pan across a scene then you do some use some features and tools to slightly animate things and it looks like a realistic video that's moving and I think this is going to be really powerful technology.

9:57I wonder at what point MidJourney or if, I don't think it's if, I believe it's when they'll jump into the video field. And I think when they decide to do that, it's going to be an absolute game changer because we have a lot of different video tools like Runway, but their quality is very, very low of the videos that they're generating. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to see MidJourney, who's built a reputation on making ultra realistic, super now, super high definition images. And if they can convert that to video, it will be absolutely insane. Now, I did want to talk about a big controversy that is going around around MidJourney, and essentially, someone was recently banned, and this is what he said on Twitter.

10:36He said, I got banned from MidJourney AI for generating realistic images of politicians cheating on their wives for a series called AI Will Revolutionize the Blackmail Industry. And he posts a couple of thoughts that he had from this whole thing, and he posts some pictures. So, essentially what happens is, you know, he was doing essentially a report on how AI was going to affect blackmail. And I believe this is interesting coming up with elections and all that kind of stuff are all around the world. There's elections all the time, but the U.S. is about to have one next year. And so I say coming up like we have over a year to go, but whatever.

11:13OK, sorry, that's just America talking from me. But anyways, it is a really interesting problem, I think. And essentially, he just generated a bunch of images of all these famous politicians, Trump and Joe Biden, kissing someone that wasn't their spouse. And, you know, it's just like this whole series he made. But what's really interesting is he posted this whole series on Reddit. He had a bunch of images and it kind of went viral. And after it went viral, Mid Journey went and banned him. Now, to be 100 % honest, from my perspective, Mid Journey has rules around what you can and can't generate with Mid Journey.

11:45And there's a lot of different reasons for that. But I actually think, you know, based off of their terms of service, I think this was a good move on their part to just show that, hey, look, we don't want to generate this kind of content. It's going to be used for a lot of misinformation and a lot of a lot of, you know, fake news, essentially, where like this is literal fake news. Right. A lot of people argue about fake news on the right and the left in America. So it's kind of funny. But this is literal fake news. as an AI gen there's nothing gets more fake news than an AI generated image of Joe Biden kissing someone that's not his wife or Trump kissing someone that's not his wife so anyways um they banned it I think that's a good move by their part I what I do think is interesting in this whole uh conversation though is the fact that they banned him not because he generated it they banned him because he generated and posted on reddit and it went viral so there's obviously he brings up the point that a lot of people could be generating this kind of content you know he was just trying to bring exposure to the fact that you can generate this kind of content and he wanted to bring and then he was banned because it went viral but a lot of people could be generating this kind of content without being banned just because they're kind of being more low-key now one other interesting thing he said here that I think is worth knowing is he generated an image of Bernie Sanders cheating on his wife that was definitely against Mid Journey's terms of service and he said Mid Journey and AI have some safeguards in place, but you can get around them with creative prompts or repeated requests.

13:12These generators are mostly just mashing up photos available on the internet, privacy, copyright, dignity, and safety be darned. So I think what is interesting is the fact that people are getting around a lot of the different kind of things that Midjourney does to block you from making images they don't like. He said, I've come up against blocked prompts in the past for naughty words or controversial figures, but never received a ban since the first time. But in any case, Midjourney does block you from generating not safe for work content. But he is saying that you can actually get around this.

13:48A lot of people are getting around this by uploading images and telling Midjourney to just remix or riff off of or modify those images. And so then essentially it's getting around the ban of MidJourney not being able to do that. So he's kind of raising that red flag. So it'll be interesting to see how MidJourney responds to this, what they do to kind of, you know, police their platform and what they're actually doing. If they do, if they should, there's all sorts of conversations around this. But I think this is something very interesting to be aware of because we obviously had images like the Pope in a puffer jacket go viral.

14:25That was an AI generated image and then mid journey was made a bunch of different changes based off of that they number one made it so you have to pay for the platform so there's not a bunch of people using it for free and one of the reasons why people are like oh man well just because people are paying for it doesn't mean they're going to stop making deep fakes but the biggest reason why payment is actually a good security measure is because if you are only accepting paid users on a platform like mid journey for example if someone generates you know one of these pieces of content that is not that is against the terms of service of mid journey it's beyond just a free random account that can just pop up like whack-a-mole they know there's a credit card tied to the account with an address with an actual verified name and so it's actually a verification process and so it makes it a lot harder to um skirt around the rules not impossible of course but like a single person eventually run out of credit cards um or friends credit cards like there is a limit so i think that um i think that it is a semi-effective method that they're trying to take and it's probably the best they can do at the moment so i think this is going to be really interesting to follow up with mid journey how they continue to evolve in the future how their platform is looking and if they're able to kind of monitor that and modify it it'll be really impressive to see what new features they come out with especially if they jump into the video field so we will be following that very closely in the future Sure.