Over the past few days, I was looking into whether I could prove if that faked Pentagon smoke image had been made using Midjourney. I’ve done a fair bit of OSINT work in the past, and no stranger to reverse image searches.

Apparently you cannot do reverse image searches from the midjourney.com/app/feed though, which is unfortunate. You can, however, search based on keywords, and maybe find something kind of like what you’re looking for. But given the variability of prompts to begin with, never mind that someone could have started with an image prompt of a building and then used some random text to modify it, the chances of you actually finding the job ID and user account which made an image become pretty low.

I’m not actually in favor of Midjourney’s showing your work to the community by default. I think it breaks protections of personal data baked into GDPR, and filed complaints in the EU about it (which were summarily rejected because I’m not an EU citizen, btw – not because they are not in violation).

That said, if you do have public-by-default images, already being displayed in a community feed, it would only make sense really to have the ability to reverse search an image, and find and follow the creator. As things heat up in the generative political image space, I think we’re going to see many more calls for these services to add more tools beyond just rev. img. search for OSINT investigators, and other enforcement bodies.

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