AI image generator Midjourney blocks porn by banning words about the human reproductive system

Midjourney's founder, David Holz, says it's banning these words as a stopgap measure to prevent people from generating shocking or gory content while the company "improves things on the AI side." Holz says moderators watch how words are being used and what kinds of images are being generated, and adjust the bans periodically. The firm has a community guidelines page that lists the type of content it blocks in this way, including sexual imagery, gore, and even the emoji, which is often used as a symbol for the buttocks. AI models such as Midjourney, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of images that have been scraped from the internet. Research by a team at the University of Washington has found that such models learn biases that sexually objectify women, which are then reflected in the images they produce.