What is Midjourney?
In this article I will show you how the Midjourney machine is somewhere in the middle of DALL-E 2 and Craiyon even for newbies.
The results are generally good, but not as stunning as DALL-E 2.
The important thing is that anyone can try a beta version of Midjourney right now (starting July 2022), unlike DALL-E 2.
At the most basic level, we find Craiyon, formerly known as “DALL-E mini”.
It’s a free app that anyone can use, even newbies, but it’s nowhere near as sophisticated as an app like DALL-E 2. The illustrations are often strange and somewhat frightening, but it’s still a lot of fun to play with.
Who created Midjourney?
The person behind MidJourney is David Holz who founded this company in June 2019 in its beta stage.
He wanted to create his app that would allow users and artists to exploit the advantages offered by artificial intelligence (AI).
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The product is available via the MidJourney page: a bot on a Discord server .
Latest developments in Midjourney
Midjourney has regularly improved its model to provide more accurate and detailed results:
- Version 5.2 (June 2023) : Produces more detailed and sharper results, with better colors, contrast and composition. Understands cues better than previous models and responds better to the full range of the –stylize parameter.
- Version 5.1 (May 4, 2023) : Stronger default aesthetic, making it easier to use with simple textual indications. It excels at accurately interpreting natural language cues, produces fewer unwanted artifacts and boundaries, provides increased image sharpness, and supports advanced features like pattern repeating with –tile.
- Version 5 (April 2023) : Produces more photographic builds than the default 5.1 model. This model produces images that closely match the indication but may require longer indications to achieve the desired aesthetics.
- Version 4 (Nov 2022–May 2023) : Featuring a new codebase and an entirely new AI architecture designed by Midjourney and trained on Midjourney’s new AI supercluster. It has increased knowledge of creatures, locations and objects compared to previous models. This model has very high consistency and excels with picture directions.
The constant evolution of Midjourney shows a strong commitment to improving the quality and accuracy of its image generations.
How does Midjourney work?
For most major AI image generators, the creators have provided tons of information about how they work at all stages and published their source code, but that’s not the case with Midjourney.
The team behind it has remained fairly discreet about its architecture and how to use it.
However, it’s more than likely that Midjourney uses a similar system to that of Dall-E 2, especially since both companies have explained their training methods in detail.
These models have learned a shared relationship between your image and the prompt used to describe it.
Midjourney has said in the past that, like its competitors, it searched the Internet for images and its query to describe them, using millions of published images to train it using machine learning .
The majority of AI art generators whose source code is public generate these images through a known process which is “streaming”.
These models work by adding noise to your image, reducing it to a pixelated mess.
It then learns to recover this data by reversing the noise process. This process is repeated infinitely, training the model to add noise and then remove it again.
The model can then apply the denoising process to create realistic images by making small variations to the image.
This goes hand in hand with the model’s understanding of the relationship between its image and the prompt used to describe it by its members.
How do I use Midjourney?
Midjourney works differently than most AI tools.
While you can sign up for the beta directly on the company’s website, use requires a server with Discord downloading and using it.
When you have been accepted, go to the Midjourney website, click on the “Join the Beta” button and you will receive your invitation to the Discord account server.
This may seem quite confusing at first, but the basics are simple.
You benefit from 25 free queries, then you will have to subscribe to a paid subscription of 8 and 60 $/month).
When you are on your Discord bot account server, simply go to one of the Beginner channels listed on the menu on the left side of the page.
Then type “/imagine” on the server followed by the message with the settings you want.
The server bot will respond to you through notifications with four versions of your topics’ message within a minute.
You can choose to get alternate versions of either of these images, or make a larger, better quality image.
In these bot channels where you request your images, it can be a little hectic, so keep an eye on where your image is.
You can see all your productions on the Midjourney website.
MidJourney Use Cases
The software is published by an independent laboratory, and is available in open beta to explore the powers of creativity of and of people.
This program creates images from a command or rather textual instructions. M
idjourney has many use cases for artists in AI imaging and art:
- Creating unique works of art
- Creation of visuals for marketing campaigns
- Develop artwork for video game projects
- Design of 3D models
- Production of illustrations for books and magazines
- Abstract visual creations for music videos
Prices
Here are the prices and usage for this artificial intelligence:
Basic plan
- Cost: $10/month
- Fast GPU Hours: 200 minutes/month usage
- Relaxed GPU Hours: Not available
Standard plan
- Cost: $30/month
- Fast GPU hours: 15h/month
- Relaxed GPU Hours: Unlimited
- You get about 1000 actions, and when you use them you can go into “relax” mode to use midjourney and generate AI art and images endlessly.
Pro plan
- This plan was launched in mid-December 2022, by popular demand.
- Cost: $60/month
- Fast GPU Hours: 30 hours/month
- Relaxed GPU Hours: Unlimited
- Use in quick mode, perfect for artists which allows you to hide your productions among others on the Midjourney gallery.
Alternatives
1. Stable Diffusion
A free and open source alternative to Midjourney.
This model can be used even on a local PC with at least 8 GB of VRAM.
Features
- Based on models such as Latent Diffusion Models, Eleuther AI, LAION, OpenCLIP, OpenAI’s ADM codebase, CompVis and more.
- Fast generation of images from commands.
- Frequently updated new versions of this tool, including Stable Diffusion XL in Beta.
Prices
- Free
A competent alternative to Midjourney for producing images from text.
2. DALL-E 2
DALL-E 2 is an application developed by OpenAI, is a robust alternative to Midjourney for generating photorealistic images from natural language descriptions.
Features
- Creation of photorealistic images from natural language descriptions.
- This tool has the ability to understand indications and merge various concepts, styles and attributes to create its unique image.
- Ability to enlarge images to create the new canvas, eliminate elements using the Inpainting tool, add shadows, textures and highlights, and more.
Prices
- DALL-E 2 is not free. After the 15 free credits are exhausted, you must purchase additional credits.
Distinguished by an ability to generate precise and realistic images, making it a powerful alternative to Midjourney.
3. Leonardo.Ai
Leonardo.Ai, this application is a completely new text-to-image generation model which is currently being compared to Midjourney.
Features
- Developed mainly to generate game elements, such as environments, buildings, objects, helmets, etc.
- A tool allows you to train your own AI model to create images tailored to your personalized environment.
- Ability to generate human faces without any imperfections in the eyes in creations.
Prices
- Free
- Premium offer at $10
The company Leonardo.Ai, with its advanced artistic tools and its ability to generate flawless human faces, presents itself as an excellent alternative to Midjourney.
Critical sense
Like its competitors, it is not exempt from criticism.
The issue of copyright sometimes raises concerns, especially since the founder admitted not having received consent from the creators on which the model was formed.
The legal notices and CGU/Confidentiality remain opaque to the processing of your personal data and for the respect of your private life.
In January 2023, 3 artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz filed a copyright infringement complaint against the company Stable Diffusion, the company Midjourney and the company DeviantArt, claiming that these companies had infringed the rights of millions of artists by training AI on five billion images extracted from the Web without the artists’ consent.
Another controversy: On August 26, 2022, the work generated this time by this artificial intelligence won a fine arts competition which was one of the magazines (Colorado State Fair Fine Arts competition.
The jury and the other artists were not unaware that this work had been artificially designed.
News: A leader of the platform openly acknowledges that political satire is “not tolerated” in China.
He states that it is better to prohibit Midjourney users from generating images of President Xi Jinping rather than depriving all Internet users of access to this service and their personal data.
As such, Donald Trump remains one of the most used executives in MidJourney’s production queue.
FAQs
What AI (artificial intelligence) does Midjourney use for images?
It uses its large-scale AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms, or Big AI, for its deep learning models and other ways to generate images.
Big AI is a form of machine learning designed to process large data sets and provide more accurate and reliable results. it combines the use of artificial intelligence algorithms with Big AI technology to produce exceptional results and generate images.
Who is the research laboratory that develops MidJourney?
This service was developed by the Midjourney laboratory which developed it quite simplymeot
The research lab explores technologies such as artificial intelligence and computer vision to improve Microsoft products and services. The lab created it, made to provide the solution to deep learning challenges.
How to use the Midjourney bot?
Midjourney is a robot that uses leap motion you can use by following the steps in the guide below to bring your imagination to life:
- Signing up for Midjourney: To get started, create an account on the Midjourney menu if you haven’t already.
- Access: After connecting, go to the Midjourney bot page which is generally found in the navigation menu of the platform.
- Interaction: Interact with the bot by asking questions or giving it specific commands. The bot can help you manage your tasks, find information, or get analytics based on your needs.
- Result: it will respond to you with the commands and information requested or confirm the action you asked it to perform with the generated images
- Finalization: If you have any other queries, keep interacting with him. Otherwise, you can simply close the chatbot window.
Remember, Midjourney allows you to create generated images whenever you need them!
Conclusion
In this article, we saw how Midjourney is amazing for creating meaningful art (painting, drawing, magazine cover, other style, etc.) and creations from prompt.
This AI could become the benchmark for many when it comes to creating AI art from parameters and commands given by the user’s hand.
We hope this blog post has clarified everything there is to know about this AI and shed some light on some of the alternatives that exist. Feel free to share this reading on social media.
If you want to fuel your creativity, take a look at using Midjourney Beta as well as DALL-E, which provide this incredible opportunity to learn, experiment or have fun!