Janus-Pro: DeepSeek’s powerful AI image generator raises ethical concerns

The news: DeepSeek’s rapid-fire AI releases, including Janus-Pro and the R1 model, demonstrate China’s push to dominate AI’s key segments. 

• The Janus-Pro image model released Tuesday claims to surpass OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion in image quality and accuracy. 
• Successive AI releases reveal DeepSeek has a deep bag of AI models in the works and could spur competing startups to initiate a new AI product release cycle.

Key stat: ChatGPT/DALL-E 3 is the favorite AI tool for 56% of US marketing professionals for any marketing use case, per AI Marketers Guild (AIMG).

Janus-Pro challenges the image-generation status quo: Text-to-image or video AI tools like DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, and Midjourney are ideal for marketing and advertising applications. Creatives and marketers can easily draft mock-ups of campaigns using these multimodal AI generators, bypassing the need for digital artists.

For example, Heinz’s AI Ketchup campaign used DALL-E  to create images of ketchup bottles, generating billions of impressions and major media coverage, per Creative Bloq.

However, independent tests by DataCamp on Janus-Pro’s text-to-image generation showed weaknesses compared with DALL-E 3, with noticeable artifacts and inconsistencies. But considering that this tool is a new release, it could improve through continued use. 

Open source can be risky: The flipside of Janus-Pro’s open-source availability is that it can be used by anyone, including bad actors looking to create deepfakes or promote misinformation. There are many examples of AI that’s been jailbroken—or hacked to disregard content and ethical guardrails—to create illicit content.

Our take: Janus-Pro’s existence will likely push its rivals to improve their products. 

Open-source availability could put it in the hands of many more creatives and marketers, but the risk of misuse is high, especially now that AI safety regulation in the US has been deprioritized. 

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