Midjourney, Artificial Intelligence and Art

Midjourney is a perfect example of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool. The program has rendered billions of images from a user text prompt. As it delves into new thoughts, it expands humans' imagination limits. In the Digital Transformation (DX) context, Artificial Intelligence is key to recasting human perception, taking our imaginative power to another level. This time, we'll discuss the revolution that Midjourney's journey (pun intended) is causing among Digital Artists and Designers. Let’s go!

What is Midjourney?

Midjourney (MJ) is an AI-powered text-to-image generator. This user-friendly tool allows users to create beautiful visuals with little effort. Its intuitive interface and automated capacities make it easy to create professional-quality designs. Plus, MJ is cloud-based, allowing accessibility from any device. If you're looking for a new tool for your stack, join the Midjourney community as it’s a good choice to create realistic images!

What is Midjourney's goal?

Midjourney is, like many others, an Artificial Intelligence system that creates images from text. Yet, this AI product has a different perspective than usual: it prioritizes visual aesthetics. Based on it, its CEO's idea was to create something different. As a result, Midjourney makes AI-generated pictures that are often indistinguishable from actual photos.

Further, another milestone of MJ is unlocking the creativity of everyday people. Midjourney AI's primary goal is to conceive attractive AI-generated art. David Holz, MJ’s CEO, wanted a more human approach. Interviewed by The Verge, he said the commercial index is less important than the sense of humanity. So, this Artificial Intelligence model aims to make humans develop their artistic process to the fullest extent. Its concept goes beyond "simple" when it comes to generating creative images from text..

How does Midjourney work?

Midjourney is no ordinary design tool. To use it, you need access through a Discord server. Once in, you can see its advantages quite fast. Since it relies on interactions with a bot, there's no need for coding within the server. Before using it, it's worth noting it has different versions that differ from each other as they provide different approaches to realistic and detailed outputs.

Another pro of MJ being on Discord is that you'll find many people in public spaces. Thus, Midjurney provides significant interaction, as seen from other users' results. Getting along with trends and learning to structure Midjourney Prompts becomes easier. Usually, people say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Yet, Midjourney thinks otherwise. With this platform, you can create a masterpiece within a phrase.

Unbelievably, generating an MJ image takes as long as rendering it. Further, its pictures are sometimes blurry, which causes a pleasant hypnotic effect. Otherwise, you can get images with a high level of detail. You can download initial thumbnails as they're only 256 px.

Also, MJ offers a credit system required to create AI art and upscale it, whether via aspect ratio or generated images. Yet, this quality upscaling may take a minute longer than the initial operation. Likewise, the platform shows a gradual system of visual improvement. To sum up, Midjourney provides variations of its images; this way, you get up to four result variations.

Midjourney and Generative AI

Generative AIs have been trending recently, especially within art, with controversies like Jason Allen’s triumph. Often, it takes a lot of work to reach a consensus about AI's utility in general and Generative AI or Machine Learning in particular. Nonetheless, Artificial Intelligence ​​is still raging despite the division, and it doesn't seem to stop soon. Midjourney has three base pillars: design, human infrastructure, and, of course, the AI.

As we said, MJ's CEO declared that he often focuses more on humanity than business. As a result, its users are usually professionals aiming to enhance their work. Nonetheless, Midjourney takes creative processes to another level. Its AI provides tangible concepts in seconds, which is crucial when only an idea arises. Also, MJ allows for finding the best ideas by converging pre-existing ones.

In consequence, the AI Art Generator can be quite a mind-relief for human creativity. Also, it lets users choose composition, color, and texture, which tends to be harsh. The art program is becoming famous, and millions of people use it through Discord. Many may wonder why you use MJ if you're an outstanding artist. The answer to it hides behind creative processes. You may be great at designing characters. But you can get inspiration if you have a creative block down.

Midjourney and Copyright

Nowadays, there are no regulations for AI platforms. Thus, the idea of ​regulatory rules is in everybody's mind. Yet, this narrative also obliterates the concept of AI being dangerous itself. As for art, Midjourney has had a lot of controversy since its start. In short, its founder acknowledged that he used hundreds of thousands of beautiful creations for a training database, a way of how Generative Adversarial Networks (GNAs) work. What's more, Holz also admitted that he used images without authorization. His defense was that getting permission for millions of images for training the model was impossible.

It's not a secret that this AI tool has thousands of data from the internet. Thus, it results in a fusion of many things that already exist. Artists like Dave Lung have shown disagreement with these platforms. He criticized his despotic way of admitting the truth, considering it a lack of respect for art. Even so, the integrity of the metadata embedded in the images is unknown. But, Midjourney's operation remains untouchable. As we discussed, this sort of riot awakens the debate on regulations of AI-based image generator tools. And we'll likely see more to this story.

Conclusion

In conclusion, AI follows us everywhere. MJ's case is one of many on the table, to name another Stability AI (former Stable Diffusion), and it won't be the last Artificial Intelligence program to impact our creative process. We live in an era with a lot of access to information. In brief, these platforms can shape the future and the wonders that come with it. Yet, many human artists think we must do more to maintain art's integrity. So, what's your take on this debate? Will AI-generated images continue to expand the boundaries of creativity? Is there going to be any AI regulation soon? And where does all that leave human art?