The news: The popular AI image generator Midjourney bans a wide range of words about the human reproductive system from being used as prompts, MIT Technology Review has discovered.
What’s included? The list of banned words seem to skew predominantly female, including terms such as “placenta,” “fallopian tubes,” and “mammary glands.” The company says it’s banning these words as a stopgap measure to prevent people from generating shocking or gory content while it “improves things on the AI side.”
Why it matters: Midjourney’s crude banning of prompts relating to reproductive biology highlights how tricky it is to moderate content around generative AI systems. It also demonstrates how the tendency for AI systems to sexualize women extends all the way to their internal organs. Read the full story.
—Melissa Heikkilä
How your brain data could be used against you
Our senior biotech reporter Jessica Hamzelou has been in Lisbon, Portugal this week to attend a scientific conference on brain stimulation. Neuroscientists, brain surgeons, psychiatrists, and ethicists gathered to discuss how to best use the technologies that use magnetic or electrical pulses to change the way our brains work.
We’re still getting to grips with how these technologies work, but in the meantime, some are generating huge amounts of data about individuals’ brains. There’s a chance this data could be used against people in a court of law, making it vital that we start thinking about these uses, and how to protect brain data, now. Read the full story.