Humanity is officially one second closer to world annihilation, scientists say. The Doomsday Clock has been revealed – and it now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, one second closer than last year. It's also the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history, meaning we're nearer to world-ending catastrophe than ever before. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which decides where the hands are set, cited the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the threat of nuclear war, climate change, a looming bird flu pandemic and AI arms race for the update. The Chicago-based nonprofit created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War II to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world.

A course at the University of Chicago taught by Daniel Holz and James Evans considers threats posed by climate change, artificial intelligence, nuclear annihilation, and biological warfare, Rivka Galchen writes.

The groundbreaking artificial intelligence image-generating company Midjourney is considering banning people from using its software to make political images of Joe Biden and Donald Trump as part of an effort to avoid being used to distract from or misinform about the 2024 US presidential election. "I don't know how much I care about political speech for the next year for our platform," Midjourney's CEO, David Holz, said last week, adding that the company is close to "hammering" – or banning – political images, including those of the leading presidential candidates, "for the next 12 months". In a conversation with Midjourney users in a chatroom on Discord, as reported by Bloomberg, Holz went on to say: "I know it's fun to make Trump pictures – I make Trump pictures. Trump is aesthetically really interesting. However, probably better to just not, better to pull out a little bit during this election.

Midjourney, an AI image generator that creates realistic deepfakes, has been scrutinized recently for having a policy showing deference to China's communist government. The company enforces a rule that users can generate fake images of world leaders from President Biden to Vladimir Putin, but not Chinese President Xi Jinping. In a year-old message on the chat service Discord, the CEO of Midjourney, Inc. explained why the company has that rule. "I think we want to minimize drama," Midjourney CEO David Holz wrote last summer. He explained that the company did not immediately ban images of Xi, but it was triggered by abuse from users.

Given Holz's reference to "abuse," it was originally thought that the pause was linked to a spate of recent viral images created using Midjourney, including fabricated images of Donald Trump being arrested and the pope wearing a stylish jacket, which some mistook for real photographs. However, Holz characterized earlier reports as a "misunderstanding" and notes that the free trial of Midjourney never included access to the latest version of Midjourney, version 5, that creates the most realistic images and which is thought to have been used for these viral pictures.

Midjourney has temporarily cancelled free trials of the AI art service after a series of AI-generated fake images went viral, according to the company's founder David Holz. Holz announced the changes on Discord (and noted by The Verge) which is the platform that Midjourney uses as its default interface. "Due to a combination of extraordinary demand and trial abuse we are temporarily disabling free trials until we have our next improvements to the system deployed," Holz said. While Holz didn't go into specifics, the subtext may have been that users have rediscovered Midjourney again. The AI art service recently deployed what it calls Midjourney v5, a new update that allows for some incredibly lifelike AI creations.

Midjourney is putting an end to free use of its AI image generator after people created high-profile deepfakes using the tool. CEO David Holz says on Discord that the company is ending free trials due to "extraordinary demand and trial abuse." New safeguards haven't been "sufficient" to prevent misuse during trial periods, Holz says. For now, you'll have to pay at least $10 per month to use the technology. As The Washington Post explains, Midjourney has found itself at the heart of unwanted attention in recent weeks.

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.

Type in a prompt like "a chocolate bar riding a bicycle in the style of Picasso," and artificial intelligence tools including DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can conjure an image for you in seconds. They do so by incorporating elements from the vast libraries of digitally available images and artwork from across the internet that they have been trained on. That question is at the heart of two new lawsuits. Last week, Seattle-based stock image giant Getty Images announced that it has initiated legal proceedings against Stability AI, the maker of Stable Diffusion. Getty alleges that the company has copied millions of its images and "[chosen] to ignore viable licensing options and long-standing legal protections in pursuit of their stand-alone commercial interests."

We can easily drown in water. But it has no intent. And the challenge that humans face when it comes to water is learning to swim, building boats and dams, and finding ways to wield its power. "You can make two images, and it's cool, but you make 100,000 images, and you have an actual physical sensation of drowning," says Holz in an interview with Fortune. "So we are trying to figure out how do you teach people to swim? And how do you build these boats that let them navigate and be empowered and sort of sail the ocean of imagination, instead of just drowning?"