/ic/ - Artwork/Critique

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I just spent a couple of hours listening to the Midjourney dev live voice chat update in their discord server. I will summarize what I heard:

They were having an "open forum" to discuss the "problem" of cis male sexuality evident in many of the generated images, in particular misuse of the key word "bikini".

All of the users they invited to speak their mind claimed to be women. One of the mods stated that this is because men "have no say" in how it affects women. These women proceeded to claim that images of "unrealistic women" that could appeal to "the male gaze" were no different than generating cp.

Their only concern was the "edge case" of a woman generating suggestive images of women, which according to them would be okay because men are not involved.

The guy who runs Midjourney, Adam I think, agreed, and proposed that users could maybe only generate suggestive images or images with partial nudity if they would opt in to somehow permanently stamping their identity on the image digitally (full name was suggested) so that they could be shamed and held accountable publicly for "being creeps".

The devs concluded that they'd "heard enough" and that no further input was needed from other users. They announced that they will be censoring the word "bikini" and a slew of similar words that can be used to generate images of attractive women. They also floated the idea of randomly changing input words such as woman to man, or bikini to business suit, to eliminate "male bias."

A small argument broke out about this as (paying) users that have been using the service for a while now disagreed with the announcement to censor their art projects. A lead dev was quick to join in and go on a strange rant about how grateful he is that white cis men would not steer the project's direction.

Do with this information what you will. I'm sure someone out there recorded the entire thing, as there were over 1600 listeners.