I am not being paid to say this: Midjourney is absolutely ridiculous

I won't profess to know all the AI image generation tools out there, but my experience of Midjourney over the last couple of weeks has blown my socks off.

https://www.midjourney.com/explore?tab=top

If you haven't seen or heard of it before, go to that link and spend 2 minutes just scrolling down and looking at some of the images produced (perhaps artwork might be a better term?).

I get that AI image generation is a bit marmite - generally the people I've met either love it or hate it with usually pretty reasonable arguments to back up their opinion either way - but if you put the politics & discourse of it aside and just sort of... stare at some of the things it creates, your brain slowly starts to boggle.

I think there are a couple of things that really hit me with Midjourney:

1. Adaptability - from hyper-realistic to abstract art to anime/manga styles to retro to renaissance to abstract to impressionist - it appears to just be able to do anything you throw at it
2. Editability - you can ask for 'subtle' or 'strong' amendments to images you produce, you can lasso and edit individual components, you can tweak aspect ratio, you can even change the 'chaos' and 'weirdness' of images as an actual value....!
3. Styles - you can use other images to inform the style of future images. Say you create a protagonist or a beautiful style that you like, you can retain that protagonist and/or style in future generated images.
4. Speed - Midjourney took roughly 2 seconds to generate 4 images from any prompt I threw at it. And this was on the basic tier ($10 pm). That is MACH-SPEED compared to chatGPT.
5. Animation capability - you can ANIMATE an image after you produce it. Create a cool character and wish they could come to life? Midjourney can turn your image into a video.
6. Community - quite simply an enormous community of creators, and all images are 'shared by default' - so everything is viewable to everyone (I kinda like that)

One of the things that I have loved most about this "AI revolution" is that it has democratised so many skills that were previously out-of-reach. Becoming an 'AI artist' (I know, quiet down the groans in the back) is now an actual thing (genuinely, there are Midjourney artists out there who are extremely proficient at prompts & prompt tuning to curate the exact image they're after).

I don't think these 'AI artists' are necessarily any less 'creative' than actual (?) artists, but it's probably likely that they wouldn't be able to re-create their artworks using pens/paint/a mouse**. Does that mean they're still artists? Yes I think so... it's just... a different world in which we live really.

Anyways, I think my view is that Midjourney is best experienced by going there and using it. Play with different prompts, tweak & edit - just have fun! I believe you can get a free trial and can always cancel before that's up 😄

I've included some of my Midjourney creations in this blog post...look up!

See ya

**for any Midjourney artists out there who can ACTUALLY draw/paint, please accept my sincere apologies for such a ridiculous generalisation 😉