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

Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator, has been criticized for banning words related to the human reproductive system in an attempt to block pornographic content. Marzyeh Ghassemi, a principal investigator in MIT Jameel Clinic and assistant professor at the University of Toronto, believes that this approach is misguided and may even exacerbate existing inequalities. She argues that algorithms like Midjourney are only as unbiased as the data they are trained on. If the training data contains biases, then the algorithm will replicate those biases in its outputs. Marzyeh leads the Healthy Machine Learning Lab at MIT.