An independent research lab. Exploring new mediums of thoughts. Expanding the imaginative power of the human species.

Very nice and interesting platform for AI assisted artwork creation. But its not what you think and how it works is quite different to other providers out there.

The start

Around early March or late Feb Midjourney launched a private beta which was by invitation only, once you applied on their website. I was already following them on twitter and was able to apply as soon as the invitations were open. Then it was a wait to see if I got in or not.

13th March 2020, I received my invitation email with instructions to access the private beta. Woohoo – exciting times!

Their platform operates on Discord, so if you are not on Discord you would need an account. Like any other Discord, you join their Server and there are many Channels inside where you can read instructions, see announcements, get help and most importantly create your art. Yes, you create your art from within their Discord server.

Midjourney Discord

The Midjourney Bot

The Midjourney bot that runs on their server is responsible for creating the art, you send it your text based prompts and it will create four diffused images as a small preview from which you can choose the ones you want to create and then it produces a higher res version.

/imagine prompt: an image of a beautiful surreal tree of life

This is how you submit your prompt by typing in /imagine prompt: followed by the actual prompt you want to use. The Midjourney bot then gets to work to create your image which shows up below the prompt.

Midjourney Bot – Prompt

Here we have the result of what Midjourney bot interpreted from your prompt and produced 4 images to choose from. You have some action buttons below.

Midjourney Bot – Resulting Image

U1/U2/U3/U4

Upscale your image using these buttons, this not only creates a higher resolution image but also produces higher level of details. As you can tell the initial image is not very detailed but has lots of potential to become something very nice.

The numbering starts from top left to top right as 1 and 2 respectively. While 3 and 4 are bottom left to right respectively. So clicking on any of the Ux buttons starts the upscaling process.

Clicking on U3 results in the bottom left image getting upscaled to a higher resolution and higher detail

Upscaled image U3 from the original 4 images

As you create images, you have various other options like Make Variation, Upscale to Max, Light Upscale Redo. You can review more information about the parameters and attributes of the Midjourney bot via their documentation page. Midjourney team are really pro-active at community feedback and therefore keep fine-tuning and releasing new features.

Redo

Don’t like the images Midjourney bot created, the button lets you run the same prompt again and Midjourney bot will produce new images for you. This saves you from having to type the prompt again and submit it to the bot.

You can also use this to create more images of the same prompt because you liked what you saw and you want more!

V1/V2/V3/V4

Variations of an image, this let’s you create variations of an image you liked in the initial diffusion it presented. The Midjourney bot then uses the nominated image as inspiration for creating similar looking images. This can be quite fun when you want to create a series of similar looking images.

Variation created from V1 from the original 4 images

Images produced by Midjourney are PNG file which means that they are highest quality as opposed to receiving a compressed JPEG. You can download a PNG version of the image below here.

Get Midjourney

At the time of writing this post, Midjourney is still an invite only platform. You can apply for the beta access via their website or ask a friend to invite you. Existing subscribers of Midjourney do get invites from time to time to invite others.

We now have Midjourney running our discord server, so you can come and join our ArtiumAI Discord and be part of our wonderful community that is learning how to bring out their creative side using AI.

Licensing

Once you have access to Midjourney via Discord, you can subscribe to various different license options, they have some options:

  • $30 per month plan which cover some commercial usage as well
  • $10 per month plan which is for hobbyists
  • Enterprise plans upon request

The only downside to Midjourney is that when you submit your prompt to the bot it is visible to others as well, you can delete the prompt after your image is created by interacting with the prompt via emoji icons. You can upgrade your plan for another $20 per month to get full private access to the Midjourney bot which works like a Direct Message, you no longer need to interact in the global Midjourney Discord server when in “private” mode.

Samples

These are some of the sample images I have created over the past few months using Midjourney, I put the JPG version here. You can also see many of my creations on my Twitter account.

Summary

In my experience so far Midjourney is a wonderful platform that let’s you create some really amazing images with the help of AI and turn your imagination to reality. I’ve been using their platform since the early days and feel quite comfortable creating artworks. There are many options that let you create what you want and they are constantly creating new features based on community feedback.

It is really exciting to see where this journey will take us into the Weird and Wonderful AI Art world!!

If you'd like to support our site please consider buying us a Ko-fi, grab a product or subscribe.