Midjourney’s fate in China is up in the air after WeChat post announcing a beta test of local services vanishes
- A WeChat account named Midjourney China published a now-deleted post, saying it was accepting applications to test its local services
- The unexplained deletion of Midjourney China’s WeChat notice underscores the difficulties faced by generative AI services trying to enter China
A Chinese company sparked excitement in the world’s largest closed internet market by promising access to US-based generative artificial intelligence (AI) art platform Midjourney, but the social media announcement was deleted within a day amid government concerns over uncensored content.
A WeChat account named Midjourney China on Monday published a now-deleted post, saying it was accepting applications from local users to participate in a limited beta testing for Midjourney’s Chinese services through QQ, another Tencent messaging platform.
The post immediately caught the attention of internet users in China, where foreign generative AI services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard are officially unavailable. Just like ChatGPT, Midjourney, which creates images based on text prompts supplied by users, has rapidly gained popularity around the world.
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Midjourney’s official channel on messaging platform Discord contains a record of the team’s “office hours notes” dated April 13, which said it was planning to use QQ, “a platform similar to Discord”, for its “expansion to China”.
On Monday, in response to a user asking whether the Chinese version of Midjourney would indeed become available on QQ, an account that appeared to be a channel administrator said “there’s an official QQ app [integration] in China in closed beta”.
According to local business data provider Tianyancha, the Midjourney China account was set up by Nanjing Pengyuhui Technologies Co, a 50:50 joint venture between two individuals Jiang Rui and Li Changbai, who each invested 1 million yuan (US$142,000).
Neither Midjourney China’s WeChat account nor San Francisco-based Midjourney immediately replied to requests for comment.
The unexplained deletion of Midjourney China’s WeChat notice underscores the difficulties faced by generative AI services trying to enter China, which requires internet platform operators to strictly censor content.
Local companies offering ChatGPT alternatives, such as Baidu’s Ernie Bot, Alibaba Group Holding’s Tongyi Qianwen, and iFlyTek’s Spark Desk, all stipulate in their terms of use that they prohibit the spread of information that harms national security or subverts the state regime.
The Chinese government has kept a wary eye on AI apps that can generate content, such as deep fakes, whereby a person’s likeness is digitally modified to look or sound like someone else.
The country’s internet censors aimed to rein in the use of deep fake technology as early as 2019. Related regulations were rolled out in January.
Midjourney has been criticised for allowing users to generate fabricated images of famous figures and politicians, which have included fake images of Pope Francis wearing a white puffer jacket and former US president Donald Trump being arrested.
