One of the AI “image from text” systems that’s gotten a lot of coverage, and shown some pretty amazing images, is Midjourney. There’s been a waiting list for it for some time (I vaguely recall), and lucky people who had access have been posting the occasional wild image to social medias (with, I expect, a relatively large cherrypick effect).
I ran across a mention today that, while still in beta, it was thrown open to anyone and everyone (a week or three ago?), with some number of free images to generate, and then some reasonable prices for stuff thereafter. This sounded interesting!
Bizarrely, the interface to it appears to be via Discord, which I suppose is perfectly natural to The Kids These Days, but strikes me as chaotic and strange and hard to use. You accept an invitation to some Discord channel, you go to one of many “newbie” channels, you enter a /imagine command with your text prompt, and then you watch your mentions (after looking up on the web how to find them) to see what comes out.
The /imagine command causes the bot to produce four thumbnails based on your prompt. There are rather enigmatic little buttons under the thumbnails, that let you ask for four (or, I guess, three) more thumbnail-sized variants based on one of the four, or to upscale one of the four.
I’ve been having some fun with it, but I don’t feel like I’ve really mastered it (or figured out when I run out of free stuff and have to decide whether to pay), because the Discord interface is just bizarre.
Anyway though :) here’s some of what I’ve done so far. I think it’s pretty comparable to the Nightcafe output, really, although some of the things I’ve seen other people post seem extra-amazing.
I’m not sure if this will turn out to be an advance over Nightcafe to the extent that I’ll start using it more, or get all excited about AI generated art again (note that Nightcafe has been hinting at a new algorithm coming also, so there’s that). Especially if the interface stays on Discord!
But we’ll see! And in general the progress here seems pretty astounding; as I said to a couple of people in the last week, if I was a professional illustrator, I might be getting worried. (Whereas I don’t feel that way about professional writers or coders yet; this may just indicate that I don’t have as good an understanding of what illustrators actually do.)
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