After igniting a global obsession with generative art, ten-month-old Midjourney appears to be entering the Middle Kingdom, the world’s largest internet marketplace.
In an article posted on the Tencent-owned social platform WeChat late Monday, a corporate account named “Midjourney China” saying has started accepting applications for beta test users. But the account soon removed its first and only article on Tuesday.
It is unclear why the post disappeared after receiving an overwhelming reception in China. The apps would only be open for a few hours every Monday and Friday, the original post said, and users quickly filled the first quota on launch day. TechCrunch has not been able to test the product.
The owner of the WeChat account is a Nanjing-based company called Pengyuhui, which was founded in October and had very little public information available. TechCrunch has been unable to verify the company’s identity and has reached out to Midjourney for comment.
Launching an Internet application in China is no small feat given the country’s strict regulatory environment. As such, it’s not uncommon to see foreign startups partnering with local partners who help operate their services on their behalf.
There have been many apps claiming to be the Chinese version of Midjourney, but this one seems the most serious. Impersonators are easy to spot as they don’t care about building communities and directly ask users to pay. “Midjourney China” said in the post that it is introducing a new iteration every 1-2 days and has a 24×7 support team to answer user questions.
To be fair, “Midjourney China” has a well thought out strategy. It chose to run on a QQ channel, the closest thing in the country to a Discord server. QQ, a PC-era legacy messenger built by Tencent, has taken center stage to facilitate community building amid China’s generative AI craze. A growing open source neural network project called RWKVfor example, it has gathered several thousand developers and users on QQ.
Tencent and “Midjourney China” have not officially partnered to use QQ, according to a person with knowledge of the matter. Rather, the latter joined as a third-party customer and started its own user acquisition.
Halfway Fandom
Tech-savvy Chinese netizens are no strangers to Midjourney, but until now they have been accessing the text-to-image generator through informal means and circumvention methods.
To access Discord, where the Midjourney bot runs, they need virtual private networks to get around the Great Firewall that prohibits the social network. Then, to pay for Midjourney subscriptions, users without credit cards have had to find agents to help with registration and top-up. Credit cards are not common in China as the country has largely moved from cash to mobile payments.
The absence of ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and the like in China has given rise to a multitude of local alternatives. It would be interesting to see if the Francisco-based company manages to win over users of Baidu’s ERNIE-ViLG art generator and Tiamat commissioningif “Midjourney China” turns out to be legitimate.
“Midjourney China” doesn’t look much different from the original art generator at first glance. Users send prompts on the QQ channel to generate images, which they can then modify with further instructions, according to their debut article. After 25 free images, they have to start paying through a pricing scheme that’s on par with the Discord-based version.
A complicated market
“Midjourney China” is appearing at a time when several Western internet giants are pulling out. Just a week ago, LinkedIn Announced it would be shutting down InCareer, an app that was built to accommodate China’s regulatory environment but was possibly not in sufficient demand. Midjourney would face the same challenge of meeting country compliance requirements while competing head-on with more established domestic players.
Any foreign player who covets the Chinese market should prepare for its ever-evolving regulations. For starters, China requires real name verification for generative AI users, just like with virtually every other internet service operating within its jurisdiction. “Midjourney China” could have conveniently met the criteria by running on QQ, where all user accounts are linked by default to one’s real identity.
There are more complicated requirements. China recently introduced a set of rules specifically for the use of synthetic media. Service providers are responsible for labeling false images that may mislead the public, for example. They are required to keep records of illegal uses of AI and report incidents to authorities. There is no doubt that Midjourney in any of its manifestations will need to censor keywords that are considered politically sensitive in China, which the company already does until a certain point.
So the question is how “Midjourney China” and QQ split the burden and costs of monitoring user behavior if the app reaches critical mass in the country.
This is a developing story – stay tuned for updates.
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