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In February 2024, scientific journal Frontiers was forced to retract a paper by a team of Chinese and Indian researchers after finding that their study contained nonsensical, AI-generated diagrams, including one of a rat with wildly oversized genitals.
As the scandal unfolded, the researchers admitted that they’d produced the absurd picture using Midjourney, an AI-powered image generator. Two years later, Midjourney is ready to make a hard pivot straight into the scientific world it was caught polluting — by launching what it says will be a full-body ultrasonic scanner.
Midjourney, which currently has no outside investors or venture capital backing, announced last week that it had invested over $74 million in ultrasound manufacturer Butterfly Network to allegedly unlock a “totally new form of medical imaging” through a device it’s calling the Midjourney Scanner.
If a company known for generating AI slop looking to get into the medical imaging business raises some serious red flags, you wouldn’t be alone. Radiologists have some serious doubts about its effectiveness as an imaging tool.
Midjourney’s scanner works, it says, by submerging a patient’s body in water while passing through a “ring of ultrasonic sensors.” In its announcement, Midjourney likens the sensors to a tiny army of dolphins that use echolocation to create a detailed 3D map of the full human body.
A flashy marketing video shows a woman slowly being lowered into a red-lit, water-filled cylinder, clearly trying to evoke a sci-fi atmosphere.
Midjourney claims a full-body scan takes as little as 60 seconds, while a full-body magnetic resonance imaging scan can take more than an hour, boasting that a “spa” featuring its scanner will open in San Francisco next year. By 2031, the company pronounced, a “fleet of over 50,000 scanners” could create one billion scans a month, covering “a huge percentage of the global population.”
“We’ve dreamed of something as powerful as MRI, and as casual as a trip to the spa, and we’re unveiling a path to that — today,” the company claimed.
Midjourney remained notably vague about what the scanner can actually spot while scanning, hand-waving that “you want as much data as you can get about your health as quickly and as cheaply as possible” and that people should get “as many ‘megabytes per second per dollar’ of information about your body,” without elaborating on what such data could include. (Futurism has reached out to the company for clarification.)
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