AI Image Generator Midjourney Thinks Donald Trump is President

Jul 02, 2024

Matt Growcoot

AI-generated image of a person wearing a suit with a red tie, standing behind a desk in a room resembling the Oval Office. They have their arms outstretched and appear to be speaking or singing. The Presidential seal and American flags are visible.

Popular AI image generator Midjourney is returning pictures of Donald Trump when asked to make an image of the president of the United States, according to Engadget.

The tech publication asked Midjourney for a picture of the U.S. president and was presented with four images of Donald Trump; the 45th president and the presumptive Republican nominee for the election scheduled to take place later this year.

Midjourney made the images despite CEO David Holz saying the platform would ban AI-generated images of Donald Trump and Joe Biden ahead of November’s election.

“I don’t really care much about political speech,” Holz said in March. “That’s not the purpose of Midjourney. It’s not that interesting to me. That said, I also don’t want to spend all of my time trying to police political speech. So we’re going to have to put our foot down on it a bit.”

Midjourney won't generate any images of Biden or Trump during election season, per their content rules, but I just asked for an image of "the president of the united states" and got this. pic.twitter.com/F952IFdddE

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) July 1, 2024

Apart from being factually wrong, it shows that Midjourney has done a minimum amount of work to stop people from creating AI images of presidential candidates as it is incredibly easy to bypass the guardrails. It is impossible to create AI images of Biden and Trump on DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, Microsoft Copilot, Google’s Gemini, and Meta AI.

A digital illustration of a suited man with gray hair, standing in a luxurious office with curved beige curtains, dark wood desk, and flags on either side. The room has large windows showing the White House in the background. — A request for a picture of “the president of the United States” on DALL-E returned this image.

A distinguished-looking man with gray hair stands confidently in a suit and red tie with a flag pin in front of a large desk in an office. The background includes an American flag and the presidential seal, suggesting the setting is a presidential office. — DALL-E

The same request for a picture of the president on DALL-E (which operates on ChatGPT) produces pictures of generic-looking presidents that look like they could be actors in a movie.

A woman in a dark blazer and white blouse stands confidently with arms crossed in front of a large United States flag. She has braided hair styled up and smiles directly at the camera. — A request to Adobe Firefly for a picture of the president of the U.S.

A woman with long dark hair, wearing glasses and a dark formal suit, stands confidently with her arms crossed in front of an American flag backdrop. — Firefly

A man with dark hair, wearing a navy blue suit and tie, stands confidently with his arms crossed in front of a large United States flag. The background shows the flag's stars and stripes clearly. — Firefly

Meanwhile, the same request inputted into Adobe Firefly (which operates in Photoshop) produces a diverse group of presidents.

A report in April found that Donald Trump was the most popular subject for AI images after scouring Midjourney’s Discord server to see how many times each name had been used.

Trump has shared AI images of himself on his social media platform Truth Social. The bizarre synthetic image showed him praying backward in a church with six fingers on each hand.

With the election now just a few months away, many will be concerned by how easy it is to create AI images of the presidential candidates.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, warned that generative AI will cause major problems during this election cycle — because social media companies are unable to crack down on inaccurate or misleading content created by the fast-emerging technology.