Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab that produces an artificial intelligence program under the same name that creates images from textual descriptions, similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. It is speculated that the underlying technology is based on Stable Diffusion. The tool is currently in open beta, which it entered on July 12, 2022. The Midjourney team is led by David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion. Holz told ''The Register'' in August 2022 that the company was already profitable. Users create artwork with Midjourney using Discord bot commands.

History

Midjourney was founded by David Holz, co-founder of Leap Motion. It first entered open beta on July 12, 2022. However, on March 14, 2022, the discord server launched with a request to post high-quality photographs to Twitter/Reddit for system's training.

The company has been working on improving its algorithms, releasing new versions every few months. Version 2 of their algorithm was launched in April 2022 and version 3 in July. On November 10, 2022, the alpha iteration of version 4 was released to users.

Functionality

Midjourney is currently only accessible through a Discord bot on their official Discord, by direct messaging the bot, or by inviting the bot to a third party server. To generate images, users use the command and type in a prompt; the bot then returns an image. Midjourney is also working on a web interface.

Uses

Founder David Holz says he sees artists as customers, not competitors of Midjourney. Holz told ''The Register'' that artists use Midjourney for rapid prototyping of artistic concepts to show to clients before starting work themselves. Because Midjourney's training set may include copyrighted artists' works, some artists have accused Midjourney of devaluing original creative work. Midjourney's terms of service includes a DMCA takedown policy, allowing artists to request their work to be removed from the set, if they believe copyright infringement to be evident.

The advertising industry has been quick to embrace AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, among others. The tools, which enable advertisers to create original content and brainstorm ideas quickly are providing new opportunities such as "custom ads created for individuals, a new way to create special effects, or even making e-commerce advertising more efficient", according to ''Ad Age''.

Notable usage and controversy

The program was used by the British magazine ''The Economist'' to create the front cover for an issue in June 2022. In Italy, the leading newspaper ''Corriere della Sera'' published a comic created with Midjourney by writer Vanni Santoni in August 2022. Charlie Warzel used Midjourney to generate two images of Alex Jones for Warzel's newsletter in ''The Atlantic''. The use of an AI-generated cover was criticised by people who felt it was taking jobs from artists. Warzel called his action a "mistake" in an article about his decision to use generated images. ''Last Week Tonight with John Oliver'' included a 10-minute segment on Midjourney in an episode broadcast in August 2022.

A Midjourney image called ''Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial'' won first place in the digital art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair. Jason Allen, who wrote the prompt that led Midjourney to generate the image, printed the image onto a canvas and entered it into the competition using the name "Jason M. Allen via Midjourney". Other digital artists were upset by the news. Allen was unapologetic, insisting that he followed the competition's rules. The two category judges were unaware that Midjourney used AI to generate images, although they later said that had they known this, they would have awarded Allen the top prize anyway. This event was similar to one described in the 1958 short story "Thing of Beauty" by Damon Knight. In the story, a man uses a machine to generate the winning image in an art competition. As in the Colorado incident, the judges in the story did not realize that the image was created by machine.

In December 2022, Midjourney was used to create the images in an AI-generated children's book in the span of a weekend. Titled ''Alice and Sparkle'', the book features a young girl who builds a robot that becomes self-aware. The creator, Ammaar Reeshi, spent hours tweaking Midjourney prompts, rejecting hundreds of generated results to ultimately choose 13 illustrations for the book. Both the product and process drew criticism: “the main problem... is that it was trained off of artists’ work. It’s our creations, our distinct styles that we created, that we did not consent to being used," one artist wrote.

Litigation

In January of 2023, three artists: Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, claiming that these companies have infringed the rights of millions of artists by training AI tools on five billion images scraped from the web without the consent of the original artists.

See also

* 15.ai
* Artificial intelligence art
* Computer art
* DALL-E
* Generative art
* Stable Diffusion

References

External links

Official Twitter

Official Discord server

{{Differentiable computing

Text-to-image generation
Deep learning software applications
Unsupervised learning