Midjourney
Théâtre d’Opéra Spatial won the Colorado State Fair’s contest for “digital arts/digitally-manipulated photography” in 2022. There was nothing special about this until people found it was generated by a AI image generator called Midjourney.
The idea that an AI generated image could win an art contest was unthinkable. It lead to a lot of lively discussions about the nature of art and what it means to be an artist and how human artistry is doomed. Those discussions continue today.
But that is not all. There are a lot of Midjourney made images that went viral. Many of them are deep fakes, like this one:
We live in a strange new world and we need to adapt - as always - because Midjourney (and others) are only getting better:
But can we use Midjourney to do some good? I think we can, here are some examples:
Artistic and creative applications
Icon sets, cliparts, t-shirt designs, stickers, coloring pages you name it. All can be done with Midjourney.
Here are some examples from a Etsy shop I like:
Exploring new visual concepts and styles
Everything is build on the foundations of something that already exists, it is inspired by many things that are.
Mixing art styles is something that was rearly done before Midjourney. Midjourney makes this common: combine art styles with artist or art references and you create new styles.
People use this for game art, concept art, illustrations, even fashion and home decor concepts.
Design and visualization
Suppose you want to decorate a room and want ideas. If you can’t afford a real decorator, you can use Midjourney instead. Just upload an image of the room and use it in a Midjourney prompt with some words that describe what you like to see in there.
Prototypes and mockups
Midjourney can be used to create UI mockups, like website page or mobile app mockups. It can be used as an endless source of inspiration. Of course, Midjourney is (still) bad at rendering text, but again, we can use the color schemes, layouts, components from the mockups.
Visual storytelling
You’re very good writer but have no illustration skills. You can use Midjourney to create illustrations for your books, stories and tutorials.
Even in the end you hire somebody to create the illustrations, giving them some examples with the illustration style you need it’s a huge bonus in time and money.
Visual representations of ideas
Midjourney is very good at this. Although the results can be surprizing as any representation of an idea can be a bit unexpected.
Conclusions
Midjourney and other AI image generators are very powerful. And as any powerful tool it can be used to do good things or bad. Some of them (e.g. Midjourney) have a strict control and don’t allow NSFW images, but some allow whatever you want to allow.
These tools and others like ChatGPT are here to stay. They will be ubiquitous. There is no turning back. I can’t even imagine without fear what these tools will do ten years from now.