Midjourney haunted by mysterious woman

I’ve apparently made over 500 images in Midjourney now, and posted quite many of them to the Twitter. It’s great fun, just like when I first found AIDungeon, NightCafe, etc. It remains to be seen how long this will last, and if I slack off after a while with the feeling that I’ve sort of scouted all the interesting parts of the conceptual space. That has certainly not happened yet. :)

In the Good Old Days of AIDungeon, there was a running joke on the subreddit about how characters named Count Grey and Karth and Kyros would constantly appear unbidden; eventually people (including me, hem hem) discovered the various stories in the specialization-set that contained those names, and eventually after that the devs added an optional filter to avoid outputs containing any of those names.

In recent days, I have discovered sort of the same kind of thing in Midjourney! There is a particular woman’s face that appears, well, much more often than any other face seems to (at least with the prompts I give, which may or may not be significant, see below) and sometimes in cases such as random-gibberish prompts where one wouldn’t especially expect a face at all.

The rest of this post will be just various pictures in which the mystery woman has appeared, from earliest to latest, with possibly-amusing observations and history in the captions.

Prompt: “The Sketches She Made Today” and that’s her upper-right and lower-left (#2 and #3)

I blew up #3 because it was such a striking face. Perhaps this is when she began slipping into my Midjourney images! Like a spirit!

Prompt: “The things we see when we close our eyes”; not necessarily her, but not obviously NOT her.

Prompt: “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point”; that’s her, obviously, upper left

The prompt here was just “Realistic detailed portrait”. We notice a certain similarity!

Prompt: “tilsit commerath bex dunnig”; she appears as #3 even with a nonsense prompt!

Prompt: “Soft-focus steampunk portrait”

Prompt: “All of her faces are angry now”. Lower-right.

Prompt: “professional portrait in the library”; Lower right again!

Prompt: “Award-winning sepiatone photograph of an enigmatic face in repose”; lower left, obvs

Prompt: “Faces in the trees; dark ominous haunted; detailed image; fantasy, night, dream, eyes”; yipes!

Prompt: “pictures of Lordes”; lower-right once again at least

prompt: “concept art film noir, songs of love”; the female lead is clearly HER

“concept art film noir, Night Life”

“People All Over The World Have Seen This Woman In Their Dreams”
yes, that was actually the prompt, and this was one of the 4-up.

Prompt: “tuppy wup kazami ghent-blum plornish” I mean, come ON!

Prompt: “Manga Action Sequence; thrilling and detailed” and now we have a Manga version of That Face

There are a few others that might arguably have been Her as well, but I tried to stick to the most compelling examples.

Clearly we ought to have a name for this woman! I attempted to get the AI to reveal it:

Prompt: “A woman wearing a name tag”

… but it did not fall for our simple strategem.

So the mystery continues! Who is this woman? Someone who occurs especially often or especially notably in some training set? Or a sort of local minimum / maximum in the network’s energy space, based on what a typical face in the set looks like? (You will have to take my word that other faces, male or blonde or with a different nose, are much rarer in Midjourney outputs.) Inquiring Minds Want To Know!

Tags: ai, artificial intelligence, midjourney, mystery