AI image generator Midjourney has paused free trials, citing "extraordinary demand and trial abuse." They will remain unavailable "until we have our next improvements to the system deployed," CEO David Holz posted on the Midjourney Discord channel.
The decision comes after several weeks of online fervor over shockingly realistic, controversial renderings that were created on the platform and circulated on the web. But Holz tells The Verge the free-trial suspension is due to new users overloading the system, not a bid to crack down on fake image creation.
Midjourney, a San Francisco-based company with just 11 employees, is a self-funded company committed to "exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species," according to its website. Those expanded imaginations have churned out faux paparazzi photos of Elon Musk holding hands with US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and GM CEO Mary Barra, chaotic scenes of former President Trump "being arrested," and Pope Francis wearing his swaggiest outfit yet—or partying at Burning Man.
With a free trial, users can only generate a limited amount of pictures, around 25 The Verge estimates, or 0.4 GPU hours "per lifetime" according to Midjourney's plan overview. GPU hours do not directly correlate to standard time hours, and they are more an indicator of compute time. More computationally intense images, for example, may eat up more of a user's allotment.
"We tried turning trials back on again with new safeties for abuse but they didn't seem to be sufficient so we are turning it back off again to maintain the service for everyone else," according to Holz.
While the temporary hold is due to system overload, not ethical concerns with the images themselves, the two are related. As the controversial images circulate, users flock to the site, generating overwhelming demand for a sophisticated task.
"Due to high demand, we are temporarily restricting concurrent job count," a Midjourney engineer posted on Discord a few days before the company paused free trials. Similar posts followed, at least one each day prior to the official pause on March 28. "People keep rapidly submitting new jobs and the backed up queue is not decreasing in size...so we're going to try to take extreme measures. Due to high demand, jobs might take longer to complete at the moment."
As of this writing, free trial access is still temporarily banned with no update on when it will return. However, paid customers can still freely generate images.
Concerns about the ethics of generative AI and large language models have grown steadily since ChatGPT's release last fall. This week, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and others signed an an open letter calling for a six-month pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.
Midjourney claims to have some built-in guardrails to restrict the images generated on its platform. After journalist Eliot Higgins posted the renderings of Donald Trump's fake arrest, Midjourney banned the use of the term "arrested" as a requested image (Higgins was also banned from using the site, BuzzFeed reports.)
At the same time, Midjourney continues to improve its image quality. A major software update released earlier this month improved resolution and the ability to interpret natural language prompts (or, understand what the user is asking for). These updates would have contributed to the hyper realistic quality of the photos we're seeing today.