MidJourney & The Rise of Ai Art

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the art world by introducing innovative tools that allow artists to create stunning artworks. Some of the most popular AI art tools include MidJourney, DALL-E and even ChatGPT (not necessarily an art tool). While these tools have helped artists push the boundaries of creativity, they have also created conflicts within the art community. Some artists feel that AI-generated artworks lack the human touch and emotional depth that traditional art possesses. Others believe that AI art is a threat to their livelihood, as it can be mass-produced and sold at a lower cost. Despite these conflicts, AI art is here to stay, and it is likely that we will see more innovative tools and technologies that blur the lines between what is human-made and what is machine-made.

A quick explanation of how these tools work:

you write a prompt, the ai generates an image based off of your words. The more detailed and technical your prompt is, the better the output from the ai is (most of the time). So for example, I think it can be fun to try and make a portrait of someone just by explaining them in prompts, rather than the popular method of simply just uploading your photo. So lets just say, we want to see me as a viking and the prompt I wrote to get these results…..

/imagine majestic portrait, full body, the chosen one, chubby dwarf, long red curly hair, long red beard, like Zach Galifianakis, ancient mystic warrior, stars and mountain background, epic, golden detailed armor, photorealistic photography, highly detailed, --v 4 --q 2

Now, there are some hot topics around ai generated art and some very interesting early lawsuits as well. I have achieved some results that very clearly have some sort of signature in the bottom corner, which makes it very clear that the bot is pulling from other peoples art work when generating images. This is a problem. However, I don't see these "art generators" as a way to make an end product that is sold directly to consumers. Moreover, I think that people will learn to leverage these tools as…well, tools! Just another instrument to get you to where you want to go.

Artists had to make some serious adjustment and were NOT thrilled when the printing press was invented. This is not too far off from something of that magnitude in my opinion. What did artists do when the press was invented? They adjusted, they accepted that the invention of the press wasn't going to disappear, they adapted and continued to make art.

We are at the very tip of the ice berg of all this and I think there are some very interesting outcomes, lawsuits, inventions and use cases for all this stuff. I can't stop thinking about the concept of trying to copyright a prompt? Is it possible? I have no clue, but imagine if companies started protecting certain prompts so that people could not replicate what they were doing with ai. We would end up in a real Vanilla Ice vs. David Bowie situation.

/imagine christmas, snow, artic, cute animals, ceramic, highly detailed, in the style of Wes Anderson --v 4 --q 2

In my field, I have messed with ai a lot but i have yet to crack the code of anything that is super helpful. There is still quite a bit of human interference with the stuff I make. Sometimes I will love something from MidJourney that I want to test out, but more often than not, I will pull that image into photoshop and work with it. But still a pretty gigantic time saver. I have tried using MidJourney for some ux/ui stuff recently. A few years ago I made a prototype for an insect identification app called "iNspect" (I will very likely make a post about that app here one day). I was curious what MidJourney could do with that concept if i fed it a decent prompt and the results did not let me down…

app UI design, insect identification, illustration, behance, dribbble::5 --v 4 --q 2

Sooner than later it will be hard to tell, especially with ad copy and top of funnel BS internet articles, if it was written by a person or a robot. ChatGPT for example does a pretty incredible job writing for you based off of prompts. Oh and its learning so quickly its genuinely scary. This won't be the last time I visit ai here on 289 days, but it is the first time I have used ai to write. Thats right, this entire article was written by ChatGPT.

No no, I'm joking…just the first paragraph. 😉