Midjourney

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About

Midjourney is an artificial intelligence system that can create images and art from a description in natural language. The AI generator is currently in a closed beta trial, which started in late February to early March 2022. Midjourney creates artwork using prompts from a user and can insert specific artistic styles into the generated images. Similar to DALL-E mini, Midjourney went viral in June 2022 after people began sharing images created by the AI on social media platforms.

History

The Midjourney beta test began around late February to early March 2022,^[1] but the lab behind Midjourney has maintained a Twitter account since November 2020.^[2] During the beta testing phase, the Midjourney program is run out of a private Discord server that is invite-only, and the AI is accessed exclusively within the Discord server. The general public can apply for an invite at the lab's website.^[9] The Midjourney Discord allows users to create 25 free images, before needing to subscribe to the product, in public channels labeled “Newbie.”^[3]

Artists and designers participating in the beta test began sharing images they had made using Midjourney to platforms like Twitter and Instagram within the first half of 2022, such as examples created by tech influencer @ctbeiser^[10] on April 13th, 2022, featuring an enthusiastic prediction for the AI's future (seen below). The post earned 327 likes in roughly two months.

The Midjourney Twitter account also took requests on Mondays for specific images to be generated and then posted them. Phase two of the Midjourney beta began on April 17th, 2022,^[4] and phase three began on May 19th, 2022.^[5] As the beta trials opened to more people, more shared images, such as this one created by user @JustinWhang and published to Twitter on June 8th, 2022, receiving over 4,100 likes in the course of a few days (seen below).^[11]

The /r/midjourney subreddit started on February 15th, 2022. The moderator of the subreddit, a user named /u/david_holz, posted two weeks earlier in /r/Discord_Bots with a job description soliciting an engineer to help create “a custom Discord server experience.”^[6] In the frequently asked questions section of the Discord server, a david@midjourney.com email address is listed as a place to ask questions about the service.^[7] The highly private nature of the Discord server, with waitlists that reportedly can last up to a month, has led to many posts on the subreddit asking for invite codes or offering to pay for invite codes.^[8]

In June 2022, as another AI image bot, DALL-E Mini, went viral, Midjourney images began to circulate more widely alongside it, with many praising the painterly and artistic qualities of the images.

Midjourney v4

On November 5th, 2022, an update to Midjourney -- volume 4 -- was released, producing a version of Midjourney which has more nuance and capacity to render objects. It also allows users to prompt the AI with images rather than text. User @cursed_san shared an example comparing a previous version of Midjourney to volume 4, earning just under 300 likes (seen below) on November 7th, 2022.^[12]

Features

Midjourney is an AI model that generates single images based on a provided prompt in natural language (English). The model is able to interpret words and combinations of words. Midjourney is also fine-tuned to understand style. The prompt for an image, which was tweeted by @rikard_io on March 18th, 2022, and received over 4,400 likes in three months, asked Midjourney to imitate the style of Russian Modernist artist Vasily Kandinsky (seen below).

Midjourney Remix

Midjourney Remix is a feature in the image generative AI Midjourney that allows users to effectively merge two images together. Added as a part of the v4 algorithm, the feature gained viral popularity in early November 2022.

Highlights

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Artflow.ai

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