Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay
from the pretty-not-okay dept
As a rule, it’s a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing to exempt Xi Jinping from the tool’s capabilities to retain Midjourney’s viability in China.
That’s right: Xi Jinping, one of the most powerful and repressive government officials in the world and most deserving of political skewering and mockery will be one of the few exempt from it, at least where Midjourney is concerned. Some other terms are restricted, though Holz won’t make the list public — “Afghanistan” for example, and now some depictions of arrests after the fake Donald Trump arrest fiasco — but Holz reportedly treats China as a unique case.
His quote about it is a doozy. From The Washington Post:
But the year-old company, run out of San Francisco with only a small collection of advisers and engineers, also has unchecked authority to determine how those powers are used. It allows, for example, users to generate images of President Biden, Vladimir Putin of Russia and other world leaders — but not China’s president, Xi Jinping.
“We just want to minimize drama,” the company’s founder and CEO, David Holz, said last year in a post on the chat service Discord. “Political satire in china is pretty not-okay,” he added, and “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire.”
He wants you to simultaneously believe that his program is so important that it must do whatever is necessary to remain accessible to people within China, but so unimportant that it doesn’t matter if fundamental political expression about one of the most powerful authoritarians in the world can’t be created on it. It doesn’t add up.
It’s no surprise that a tech CEO would be willing to make trade-offs for the Chinese market. At this point, it’s more surprising if one won’t do so. But Holz’s position is particularly careless and reveals an increasingly serious threat to free expression on and offline today: individual countries’ censorship laws, particularly those of powerful countries like China, are setting global rules sometimes enforced by tech companies anxious to display their compliance. It’s not just Midjourney’s China-based users that can’t satirize Xi Jinping — that rule applies to users everywhere, even in the United States.
Local laws are suddenly not so local anymore, and people like Holz have no qualms about aiding their illiberal international spread.
What this means in practice is that authoritarian leaders don’t just get to subject their own countries to repressive laws limiting political speech. They also get to set the rules for global communities which are not, and should not be, under any expectations to abide by them. Zoom engaged in such practices in 2020 when it applied Chinese law to users outside mainland-China, shutting down online Tiananmen memorials held by users in Hong Kong and the United States. In response to well-deserved criticism, Zoom announced it would no longer allow Chinese law to dictate policies outside mainland China. Midjourney took notes, it seems, and learned a different lesson.
Holz’s exact words were “the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire,” but his meaning was clear: Midjourney’s interest in being accessible in China is more important than its users’ interest in engaging in political expression.
This acquiescence signals to authoritarians of all sorts that if they want to control their image on the global internet, ramping up repressive efforts at home will be rewarded. As if they needed more incentive. Oversee a large enough financial market and censor enough people and you, too, may be able to control your reputation on the global internet.
Will Midjourney stop with just Xi Jinping? Or should we expect satire of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for example, to be next on the chopping block if Midjourney wants access to an increasingly unfree India?
Lastly, Holz may argue that he’s helping Chinese citizens — and not just his own company — by attempting to ensure that Midjourney will be available in China. But his claim that he wants to preserve “the ability for people in China” to use this tech is paternalistic in a way Holz doesn’t seem to realize. Chinese citizens, after all, may themselves want to use Midjourney to satirize their own government. Why does their freedom to satirize their ruler matter less than the freedom of the rest of the world to mock their leaders?
In fact, in the later months of 2022, protesters in cities across China held up blank sheets of paper in country-wide demonstrations to protest not just the country’s restrictive COVID policies, but the many things that Chinese citizens aren’t allowed to voice. This censorship is a result of oppressive and wide-ranging governmental control over what they can say in every forum, online and off. But it’s reinforced when foreign companies, in this case a U.S.-based AI image generating tool, are all too eager to do their part in enforcing those restrictions — not just on the population legally bound by them, but on the rest of the world, too.
Companies like Midjourney may be the vanguard of new technology and the changing internet. But censorship is nothing new, and they won’t change the game by willingly conducting reputation management for authoritarian governments.
That, one might say, is “pretty not-okay.”
Sarah McLaughlin is Senior Scholar, Global Expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Filed Under: ai, censorship, china, david holz, free speech, generative ai, political speech, satire, xi jinping
Companies: midjourney
Comments on “Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay”
Taboo images
It’s interesting people are using AI to create political and religious statements. This speaks to the AI being a tool of the artist. You can’t send AI to hell for making images of the profit Mohamed.
Re:
Let’s not, OK? As if we need to teach AIs a lack of respect.
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This is an AI specifically intended to be used to generate satirical images. The whole point is to show disrespect.
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So you think satire and disrespect are synonymous?
What exactly is satirical about an image of the prophet* Muhammad? You’re not being satirical, you’re just doing something that you know will offend a third of the human race.
Hey, maybe a crucifix covered with shit is satire? Let’s offend a different third of the human race! Maybe a depiction of the Buddha sodomizing Ganesh, or vice versa? Offend the other third! Hey, it’s all satire, right?
No. My original comment stands. Yours doesn’t.
*And maybe “satire” ought to be restricted to people who know how to fucking spell, and know the difference between profit and prophet.
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They certainly overlap. It’s challenging to satirize a subject respectfully.
Inherently, nothing. But such an image could be satirical.
Correct. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t.
Whether it’s satire doesn’t depend on whether anyone is offended by it.
You don’t get to just invalidate others’ speech. Their comment stands whether you like it or not.
Thankfully in the US we have better protections for freedom of expression than that, and we are free to express ourselves with or without spelling errors on any subject we please.
Re: Re: Re:3
Exactly. Nobody cares if idiots who believe in an imaginary friend just so they can hate drug use and anal sex get their choirboy molesting panties in a bunch. Humiliate them into oblivion. Scorn the day they walked the earth. True love will reign forevermore.
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A spelling nitpick dude that can write satire? That’s a new one…
Can’t wait for a Republican president to whine about this shit to his voter base and get himself exempt from Midjourney-created satire. 🙄
But if donald is exempted, how will he grift?
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You say that like he doesn’t have plenty of other ways to separate gullible idiots from their money.
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He has 74 million willing footsoldiers to grift.
He could literally make up a lie and sell it to them, and they WILL pay.
He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again. Shame that his “grifting” will affect the rest of the world.
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I’m surprised he isn’t selling prints of that AI-generated photo of him doing something he’s probably never actually done before in his life (i.e., praying to the Christian God).
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He’s got that horrible artist who keeps portraying him as brave, fit, and patriotic for that kind of bullshit
Re: Re: Re:2 The ultimate bad trip
… someone needs to find out what drugs that person is on to cause hallucination that divorced from reality so everyone else can rightly avoid both the artist and whatever drugs are responsible.
Re: Re: Re:3
No drugs involved. Just a bog standard
fascistRepublican:https://www.google.com/search?q=Jon+McNaughton
He was the first hit when I searched “terrible artist who keeps making trump art”
Re: Re: Re:4
A disconnect from reality to that degree really should require all sorts of drugs natural and/or artificial but I suppose some people’s brains are just that messed up.
Simping for Xi again?
What is it with idiot techbros and their propensity for supporting asshole dictators…
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They want to have the same power and control. It’s really as simple as that.
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David Holz thinks MidJourney is chosen one, unlike those other unworthy tech companies who were given sweet overtures long enough to be IP mined by Chinese partners and then immediately replaced in the Chinese marketplace by a local competitor with CCP subsidies and unevenly-applied laws.
The era of Western tech owners Scrooge McDuck diving into the yuan swimming pool was past prime more than 10 years ago, and everyone with sense saw how bad it recently went for western companies with Russian entanglements and is vacating the pool ASAP because they don’t want their stuff in China when Xi Jinping tries to conquer Taiwan.
'We must protect them from themselves!'
David Holz, Minjourney CEO: Look, China having to crack down on people making fun of their Dear Leader is pretty not-okay so we’re just stepping in to ensure that they don’t have to do that, which solves the whole thing.
Should have just admitted that he’s fine swinging the cudgel on behalf of authoritarians rather than claiming it was because he was just so concerned about their subjects, I doubt anyone is going to believe such a laughably weak lie and now he’s not only shown what he truly values but demonstrated he’s not even honest enough to own it.
I've spent many hours experimenting...
…with multiple image generators, except one: Midjourney, because the five tiny credits (I think it’s five; correct me if I’m wrong) it bestowed on free users once and once only made me want to reserve my credits until I’d readied the greatest prompt in the world. I never got the chance before being shut out. But over the past 24 hours, since reading at least three different “official” reasons Midjourney is now pay-to-play only, and after this latest boner from Holz, I’m kind of glad I didn’t invest the time and effort.
Cuddly imagery
So it’s OK to ask Midjourney for an image based on the text
No, it’s only China. There are no other authoritarian countries with a large enough market to matter. It’s just capitalism and profit maximization at work.
Sgt. Schultz says...
First, I concede that I know NOTHING about what goes on behind closed doors at big tech companies. So I say this with no authority whatsoever.
That said, it is possible that a tech CEO in a position to either allow or throttle their services in China makes their decisions based on more than just moral, ethical, or political fortitude.
Given the strong-arm tactics used by China in all of its doings, i.e., building islands in the sea to claim sovereignty, oppression of Uyghuirs, disappearing certain unsavory folk, etc., I would not be the least surprised if some Chinese official made an offer to Midjourney folks that they could not refuse.
I, for one, would rather err on the side of existing on the top side of the soil than not. Ethics be damned.
Never trust Winnie the Pooh.