What is Midjourney AI?

In the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence, a new tool called Midjourney has captured the attention of artists, designers, and anyone interested in creativity. This AI-driven image creation platform has quickly become popular because it allows users to turn their ideas into visually stunning pieces of art. By entering simple text descriptions, Midjourney uses powerful machine-learning technology to create realistic and highly detailed images. Whether it’s dream-like scenes or lifelike portraits, this advanced tool allows people to push past the limits of traditional art and explore new creative possibilities.

Whether you’re a seasoned artist seeking new avenues of expression or a curious enthusiast eager to witness the marvels of AI-driven creativity, Midjourney promises an enthralling journey. In this blog post, we’ll delve into the fascinating world of Midjourney, exploring its capabilities, examining its impact on the artistic community, and providing insights into how this groundbreaking tool is reshaping the way we perceive and create visual art.

But before that, let’s outline the topics that we will be discussing in this blog:

• • What Is Midjourney?
  • History of Midjourney
  • Working of Midjourney
  • How Do You Access Midjourney?
  • Step-by-Step methods to create your own AI Art
  • Midjourney Commands
  • Will Midjourney Replace the Human Artists?

What Is Midjourney?

Midjourney is a generative AI model that combines art and technology, blended with human creativity, to generate stunning art images from text-based prompts. It generates images from natural language descriptions and uses machine and deep learning algorithms to generate new and real art images.

The great thing about Midjourney is that it combines the creativity of humans with the capabilities of powerful AI. You get to come up with the initial idea and description, and then the AI takes that and runs with it, creating a visual masterpiece that goes beyond what you might have pictured. You can keep modifying your description until the AI generates an image that perfectly captures your vision. It’s a partnership between human and machine, allowing for artistic possibilities that have never existed before.

History of Midjourney

Midjourney is created and hosted by the San Francisco-based independent research lab Midjourney Inc., which was founded by David Holz, who was previously the co-founder of Leap Motion. On July 12, 2022, it entered open beta, and since then, it’s been upgrading its algorithms and launching new model versions almost every few months.

Here’s the list of Midjourney versions with their release dates

For Regular models:

For Other Models:

Niji is a collaboration between Midjourney and Spellbrush, which is tuned to produce anime and illustrative tasks. The latest version of Midjourey is the alpha iteration of Version 6, which has been trained from scratch for nine months. This version is considered to generate the most detailed and realistic images compared to its previous versions.

Now, by looking at the quality of the images, you might be wondering how the model works to produce these realistic and stunning images. So, let’s cover that in the following section.

Working of Midjourney

Midjourney uses Machine Learning Algorithms to interpret and analyze the data. This data can be in the form of text, audio, or image. After getting this data, the algorithm will use it to generate new images, sounds, or other media types based on the patterns found in the data.

One of the most common types of deep learning algorithms it uses is Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). So, let’s explore these algorithms 

1. Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)

A generative adversarial network (GAN) consists of two neural networks – a generator and a discriminator – that are trained simultaneously in a competitive manner. The generator network takes in random noise as input and generates fake data samples, such as images, that attempt to mimic the real data distribution.

The discriminator network takes in both real data samples and the fake samples produced by the generator and tries to classify them as real or fake. The generator aims to generate fake samples that are indistinguishable from real data in order to fool the discriminator. Conversely, the discriminator tries to distinguish the generator’s fake samples from real data samples. This adversarial training process continues, with the generator becoming better at generating realistic samples and the discriminator becoming better at distinguishing real from fake. Ultimately, the generator learns to capture the real data distribution, enabling it to create new, synthetic data samples that are highly realistic.

         2. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN)

A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a type of artificial neural network designed to process sequential data by incorporating loops that allow information to persist and flow through the network, enabling it to model and learn from sequential patterns and dependencies in the data.

At each time step, an RNN takes in the current input and the hidden state (the network’s memory) from the previous time step, processes this information through its neural network layers, and produces an output and an updated hidden state, which is then fed back into the network at the next time step. This recurrent nature allows RNNs to make predictions or decisions based on the entire sequence of inputs seen so far, making them powerful for tasks like language modeling, machine translation, speech recognition, and time series forecasting.

How to Access Midjourney?

You can access Midjourney through the Discord bot on their official Discord server, or by directly messaging the Discord bot and also you can invite the bot to a third-party server.

Here are the basic steps to Access Midjourney

Step 1) Open midjourney’s official website https://www.midjourney.com/home

Step 2) Click on “Join the beta” and you will be directed to the discord page

Step 3) Provide the credentials and accept the invite

Step 4) Join the Midjourney community (#newbies) and start giving prompts with the command “/imagine (prompt)”

Step-by-Step Method to generate your own AI Art

Now that you understand how to access Midjourney, Let’s bring our knowledge into practice. In this section, we will be creating our own AI art using Midjourney. 

Follow the steps below to bring your imagination into the form of AI art:

Step 1) Go to the message box and type “/Imagine” to enter a new prompt

Now, once you write the command, a prompt box will appear where you can write your prompts.

Step 2) Enter the prompt in the prompt box

For this tutorial, we will be writing the prompt as ” A lion with a crown in a sunset”

Step 3) Provide the prompt and let Midjourney generate your image

Step 4) Once the images are loaded select the one you liked 

Step 5 ) Once the selected image appears, open the browser and download it

Midjourney Commands

Now, in the above tutorial we have seen that to input a prompt we have to write a command “/Imagine”. Now, let’s explore some more of these commands to have a better understanding of Midjourney AI.

Will Midjourney Eventually Replace Human Artists?

After knowing the capabilities of the Midjourney generative AI tool one question might come to our head “Will it replace human artists?”  Let’s understand

In 2022, a picture made by an AI system called Midjourney won first place in a digital art competition at the Colorado State Fair. A person named Jason Allen typed in instructions for Midjourney to create this picture, which was called “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial”. Jason then printed out the picture onto a canvas and entered it into the art competition, using his name Jason M. Allen along with “via Midjourney”.

The two judges who picked the winning artworks did not know that Midjourney used artificial intelligence to generate images. However, after finding out, the judges said they still would have given Jason Allen’s Midjourney picture the first-place prize even if they had known it was created by an AI system.

Another incident took place in Italy, one of the biggest newspapers Corriere della Sera published a comic book in August 2022. This comic was created using the AI system Midjourney. The person who made the comic by giving instructions to Midjourney was a writer named Vanni Santoni.

Then in December 2022, the AI system Midjourney was used to create the pictures for a children’s book made in just one weekend. Called “Alice and Sparkle”, the book is about a girl who builds a robot that becomes self-aware. The book’s creator, Ammaar Reeshi, had Midjourney generate many images and then picked 13 of them for the book.

 All of these incidents convey the message that Humans and AI are not enemies, they work together to bring a new revolution in this world of technology. However, in some sectors, we have to agree that AI can work more efficiently than Humans, but we also have to understand that there is always a human brain behind the work of AI. The creativity of the human brain when blended with AI, amplifies the quality of the output and for that, all we need to do is to learn the usage of these AI tools, and then we soon we will be witnessing the progress we bring in our society together.

 Also if you want to learn more about the Midjourney AI, then you can enroll in our “Midjourney course”