AI image generator Midjourney has stopped free trials of its software:
AI image generator Midjourney has halted free trials of its service, blaming a sudden influx of new users. Midjourney CEO and founder David Holz announced the change on Tuesday, originally citing "extraordinary demand and trial abuse" in a message on Discord (this announcement was spotted first by The Washington Post). In an email to The Verge, Holz stated that the pause is "because of massive amounts of people making throwaway accounts to get free images."
"We think the culprit was probably a viral how-to video in china," said Holz over email. "This happened at the same time as a temporary gpu shortage. The two things came together and it was bringing down the service for paid users."
Given Holz's reference to "abuse," it was originally thought that the pause was linked to a spate of recent viral images created using Midjourney, including fabricated images of Donald Trump being arrested and the pope wearing a stylish jacket, which some mistook for real photographs. However, Holz characterized earlier reports as a "misunderstanding" and notes that the free trial of Midjourney never included access to the latest version of Midjourney, version 5, that creates the most realistic images and which is thought to have been used for these viral pictures.
[...] Midjourney maintains a list of banned words "related to topics in different countries based on complaints from users in those countries," as per a message from Holz last October. But it doesn't share a complete version of this list to minimize "drama." As Holz said last year, "Almost no one ever notices [the ban list] unless they're specially trying to create drama which is against our rules in tos [terms of service] 'don't use our tools to create drama.'"
[...] At the time of writing, Midjourney is still not allowing free users to generate images, though this may change in the future. "We're still trying to figure out how to bring free trials back, we tried to require an active email but that wasn't enough so we're back to the drawing board," said Holz.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday April 01, @01:45PM (1 child)
"I like money."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday April 01, @02:12PM
Also, attention.
It's amazing what's going on in the indie scene, particularly on Civitai. I thought for a while that big data had found its holy grail of rent seeking with AI as a service. But now, there are all the overlay technologies (Hypernetwork, LoRA, Textual Inversion, or, brand new, Lycoris), and the ControlNet modes, and the efficiency gained with optimized internal representations. There's a lot of fun to be had for independent geeks with a decent gamer's GPU. Such a lot that the data centers aren't really needed anymore.
I wonder if the "Trump arrest" pictures and the following ban was a publicity stunt, too. And if the bigwigs soon group up to ban that technology in independent hands for "safety" (of their business model). Download the models while it lasts.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday April 01, @04:18PM
Stable Diffusion does girls better anyway.
The edge of 太玄 cannot be defined, for it is beyond every aspect of design