Midjourney, the AI image generation company best known for producing pictures on demand, announced on Wednesday that it is opening a medical spa in San Francisco. Guests will be lowered into a tank of golden light while three hundred fifty-eight thousand ultrasonic transducers scan their bodies. The Register wrote it up. The underlying scanner technology is real — it's a Caltech research project using hardware from Butterfly Network, the latter of whom Midjourney initially neglected to mention in its announcement and had to issue a press release on its own behalf. The company claims the scanner could prevent thirty percent of all deaths and fifty percent of healthcare costs, pending FDA approval, which it describes as the "next limit."

The panel reads it not as a fraud but as a specific kind of pivot the industry has seen before. In 1994 th ...