I've been enjoying creating things on MidJourney.
A recent update to the algorithmes and tinkering with the AI done by the very talented engineers that work on the project has greatly improved the realism of the outputs.
Though they have been created by prompts input by myself and over a brief curation of the output generated, there does seem to be a bit of a backstory to some of the images.
It could be very interesting indeed to imagine the circumstances that led to each picture. Is it a fire being reflected in that man's sunglasses? Or a sunset?
This med-tech or robot seems to be looking for something, what could it be?
I hope to use one or two of these images to spur my brain to come up with a short story or two. Maybe we'll see that on Hive in the not too distant future.
The idea and now reality of AI art creation is full of possibility and controversy.
Some are using it to make comic books, lyric music videos, concept art for games and more. I've even seen some people using it to create a deck of cards!
Personally, I think it is a good tool to use for inspiration. A bit like looking through Pinterest or going to an art exhibition.
It's also a bit like a camera being compared to photorealistic oil paintings.
This little bit of whimsy was created by using one of my macro photos of a spider and telling the AI to steampunk it up.
It's certainly not a spider now, but you can still see the hints of the round eyes of the spider and the colour theme of the photo is reasonably close.
While most of the site is indeed in English, it does understand other languages.
I prompted the AI with "三番目の彼女” which translates to "The third girlfriend" and added tags for photography. These are two of the slightly disconcerting results:
Who are these women and why is the second image so young?
The polaroid like frame makes it seem as though they are missing persons?
A bit brighter and happier results from using "Flowerpunk" in the prompt:
My artistic expressions are usually done using a camera, notably macro photography, however, even just playing with
MidJourney has given me some new ideas to try to recreate some of the outputs or arrange some similar compositions. Really need to get some aviator style sunglasses!
What do you think of Midjourney and other AI art generating AIs or bots?
Is is art? Cheating? No different than a camera?