Hit this error message in Midjourney a number of times yesterday, I won’t say how:

Request cancelled due to output filters

Sorry, while the prompt you entered was deemed safe, the resulting image was detected as having content that might violate our community guidelines and has been blocked. Your account status will not be affected by this.

This is the most weird and convoluted and post-modern non-apology I’ve ever heard. Every single time I get an automated wrist-slapping in Midjourney now, I always “notify developers” (which has no effect), because it always feel wrong. I don’t even care what the community guidelines are at this point… just let me make my art and get out of the way.

I guess they have to do what they think they have to do, but I wish one of those things was thinking they need to offer a better end-user experience that is more directly in touch with the needs of practicing artists who are working with AI tools in ‘flow states’. The only effect these types of warnings and errors have for me now is to motivate me to find other systems that don’t block the expression of my creative vision and explorations and that try to tell me my (totally legal) imagination isn’t ‘safe’.

While Midjourney v6 alpha quality is great (mostly), the veil is wearing thin on a lot of these services for me lately. I’m fatigued by anything that blocks or slows down the execution of the project I’m trying to achieve in the moment. It’s a trend that seems, however, to be worryingly on the rise among these tools.

I’d like to see a more artist-centric approach, where people using these tools have greater control over the sensitivity & presence of various types of filtering, including content filtering as one of the parameters.

Related writing & research