AI or Artificial Intelligence is making leaps and bounds in all facets of life. There are A.I. driving cars, and are on all of our devices with clever names such as Siri, Alexa, or Cortana. There is a new A.I. that I have been working with that has completely changed my perception of A.I., Midjourney.com.
What is Midjourney.com?
Midjourney.com is an application that will turn your text into images. Sometimes incredibly beautiful images, and sometimes quite disturbing images.
Midjourney uses Discord for al of your image configurating. Following general commands you can send your image configurations to the Midjourney bot and it will return an image back to you, which you can then upscale to better quality or ask it to create a new image using the same parameters.
Is Midjourney going to take jobs away from artists and graphics designers?
There is some controversy over what this A.I. means to artists. I have two children that are in high school and college and both are interested in the arts and graphics. What does Midjourney and other image A.I. bots mean for them?
Well, there will always be a place for artists, and for now, I don’t think graphics designers have a huge concern. There is a bit of a learning curve on creating images that work for specific instances, and duplicating a consistent look that doesn’t just mimic a known artists’ style is difficult.
These image generation A.I. bots like Midjourney actually create a new potential job market. Image configurators. People who are learning the ins and outs of what to tell the artificially intelligent image producing applications.
I like to think of them as a new medium. Oil Painting, Acrylic Painting, Watercolors, Photography and Digital Photography, can now cozy up next to A.I. Generated Image Configuration, the new art medium on the block.
How can I try Midjourney out?
You can try out Midjourney with a beta account or dive in with a basic or standard membership. You can also pay for CPU hours as needed, which is how they count your usage.
How much does Midjourney cost?
- The basic membership costs $10 USD a month.
- The standard membership costs $30 USD a month.
What do you get with each level of membership?
With the basic membership, you will get enough CPU hours to produce around 200 images a month.
With the standard membership you will have unlimited personal use. Which means that using the relaxed mode, you can produce as many images as you would like, and you have a limited number of images that you can create using the /fast method. Essentially /fast puts you up in the Queue, but for the most part, you can stick to /relaxed and not even use those CPU cycles. The /relaxed command is only available in the standard membership.
Another thing you get with the standard membership is access to the member gallery. This is a great place to look for inspiration and to see what commands other A.I. image configurators are using to produce their masterpieces.
Below, you can see some of the images I have configured, and I will be adding image galleries to the site as well, as there is not a great place to share your images yet. To view the galleries in Midjourney, you must have an account.
