Midjourney’s New Feature Produces Alarmingly Simple Deepfakes
The platform includes guardrails, but many others won’t
This week, Midjourney released a massively exciting feature, which users have demanded for months: character references.
The new tool allows Midjourney users to create consistent characters across multiple images. As we’ll see, it’s a huge deal for artists, illustrators and animators.
But the new feature also has a dark side. It allows even novice users to create alarmingly convincing deepfakes in just a few simple clicks.
Let’s explore.
The Power of Character References
Character references are a huge deal for AI image generation.
Before, each image you created with an AI image generator like Midjourney or DALL-E was discrete. The images stood alone — although power users found clever workarounds, you couldn’t easily use elements from one image in future images.
That was a big problem for illustrators and animators. Creating a series of illustrations with a consistent character — for example, to illustrate a children’s book or graphic novel — was nearly impossible.
