Boost your creativity with Midjourney
Text to art Tanya Combrinck looks at how AI tools are supercharging creativity and taking the digital art world by storm
Over the last few weeks you may have noticed a new kind of artwork creeping into your Twitter feed; fascinating, highly detailed images with composition and style quite unlike anything that’s gone before. It’s Midjourney: a new AI tool that creates art based on a text input. Text-to-image AI tools have been around for several years now, but this one is attracting particular attention for producing exceptionally beautiful and original abstract artwork.
Midjourney is currently in private Beta and runs as a bot on Discord. You can apply for access over at midjourney.com. To start creating images, you join one of the channels and submit text prompts in the chat window. You might try something like “a beautiful painting of a steampunk owl in the moonlight”. The AI bot replies with four thumbnails, and if one or more are close to what you are trying to create you can choose to iterate on them to receive four more thumbnails. You can continue iterating, or you can tweak your text prompts to get different results. When you have an image you like, you can upscale your chosen thumbnails to get a high-resolution output.
Anyone can get decent images out of Midjourney by entering simple descriptive phrases, but to achieve something special you need to be imaginative and learn how to use the prompts to get interesting results. A major plus point of the tool running within Discord is that you can see how others create their work. Beginners typically enter basic phrases; more experienced users may enter 20 or so highly specific instructions to produce dazzling images with exquisite detail. Watching others is a great way to learn, and you can also try resources such as weirdwonderfulai.art, where people have conducted experiments using different prompt phrases to give you an idea of how they will affect your image.
The Midjourney tool has only been around for a few weeks, but professional artists are already using it as part of their creative process.
Kenneth Scott is an art director working in games whose credits include Halo 4 and Doom 3. He sees Midjourney and other AI art apps as a way to supercharge creativity and speed up iteration. “Its strength for me, right now, is concept and early ideation; it can help craft a vision, and rapidly,” he says. “It’s hard not to get wobbly in the knees when you strike gold; you are often sitting in front of artwork that would not be possible even with months of iteration. In minutes. With 20 more just as brilliant rendering behind it.”
GENERATE BEAUTIFUL ART
Kenneth advises new users to embrace the serendipity of creating art with an AI. “My favourite pieces always landed a certain degree away from my intent,” he says. It typically takes just a few minutes to generate thumbnails, so Midjourney allows you to stumble across these happy accidents very quickly.
I’m looking forward to seeing people all over the world empowered with a new way to express themselves
Often the best way to get an aweinspiring or fascinating image out of an AI is simply to ask for it, using those words. “One of the very surprising things about Midjourney is its ability to place meaning on words you would ordinarily describe as actionless hyperbole,” says Kenneth. “Stunning! Beautiful! Dramatic! These are demonstrably effective in developing an image.”
The potential for AI tools like Midjourney to change the process of creating art and the role of the professional artist is clear, but how things change will depend heavily on the particular role and, if it’s part of a large production such as a film or game, where it sits in the pipeline. “It won’t make your character mesh, texture your model, paint over your greybox, or make anything to the specifications a production might require,” says Kenneth.
EMBRACING CHANGE
Some artists feel threatened by AIS, but Kenneth is philosophical about the inevitability of change. “I’ve worked in game development for over 25 years and been through a few tectonic shifts regarding content creation, so it’s been important to me to squint through the abject terror of all-capschange and find excitement for it. I’ve witnessed too many talented traditional artists fail to adapt to digital 2D, 3D, etc. Art history is filled with innovations, modern film and game development is filled with rapid changes; artists need to find the part of themselves that enjoys that.”
The good news is, it still takes an artist to recognise good output from bad. “It’s clear that success with AI art generation stems from good art fundamentals,” he says.
Graeme Cornies is an artist and composer who releases his Aigenerated work on Twitter at @Arcadekodiak and @Cabinorchestra. He has been making imagery with AI since Deepdream became available to the public around 2016. “I’ve been hooked ever since,” he says. “Midjourney has been a cut above other text-to-image models at handling abstract and symbolic thinking. I’ve even been using it to pick up where my own imagination leaves off, to help me visualise things that I can’t easily
picture. For me, Midjourney shines at this.”
Like Kenneth, Graeme sees Midjourney as a powerful tool that professional artists could use for compositional brainstorming, texture generation, and to speed up workflow dramatically. “I suspect that it will become common for AI outputs to be under-paintings for concept artists to augment with photobashing, collage and digital brushwork,” he says.
For Graeme, working with an AI is a process of co-creation with an “all-star collaborator”, and he compares it to an incredible producer capable of turning an artist’s acoustic guitar jam into a radio hit.
AN EMPOWERING TOOL
Rather than a threat to artists, Graeme sees AI tools as a big opportunity. “I think the artists that embrace this kind of technology early will have a tremendous advantage over those who don’t. These tools are like a fighter jet for your imagination, so if you have a great imagination already, you will only be empowered by such
It usually takes hundreds of attempts with different variants of text prompts
an incredible artificial collaborator,” he says. “People who already have skill as a visual artist will shine at augmenting outputs to better match their vision in whatever way they see fit. I’m looking forward to seeing people from all over the world empowered with a new way to express themselves visually.”
Unlike Kenneth and Graeme, Nekro (look for @NEKROXIII on Twitter) is an artist who has not used AI tools before Midjourney. Instead of using it to create a full image, he looks for components of the final artwork he wants to make and assembles them in Photoshop using photobash and overpainting techniques. “It usually takes hundreds of attempts with different variants of the text prompts to get what I want,” he says.
Nekro’s haunting images focus around female figures, death, and winged creatures. Despite each work requiring many hours in Photoshop, he has produced dozens of images within just a few weeks of getting started with Midjourney, which goes to show how much it speeds up the creative process. He says that the advent of art AIS may be as significant as the leap from traditional to digital art, but he doesn’t see these new creation tools as a threat. “No matter how much the AI advances, what really matters is the artist who is using the tool,” he says.