I tried MidJourney: my thoughts as an artist
MidJourney is an AI application that allows users to write prompts and then it creates images for that prompt. It works in discord and more information can be found here.
AI is popular right now and so I thought I would see what MidJourney is like, it took me a couple of minutes to understand how it works and I was impressed by the results.
What I like
- It's super quick, only takes a few minutes in fast mode.
- You can make the prompt as vague or descriptive as you want.
- It could be great for spitting out ideas or concepts quickly with minimal effort.
- I can use this as a place to source images for articles, book covers and references for my artwork.
- Humans still need to have an imagination and be good at describing what they want.
What I don’t like
- I feel this will cause more distrust in digital artists. More people will believe artwork is created by AI and therefore have less value.
- It's hard to accurately describe an image when you are used to drawing them.
- I believe it will take more jobs away, especially for game artists and concept artists, smaller studios will be able to ‘pop’ them out themselves. Writers will be able to make their own book covers and artwork for their books/articles.
What do you think about it? Will it make or break the digital art world?
Making an image
When I used it I asked myself this question: if I write a highly detailed prompt could I create an image that is in my head? I tested this by writing the following prompt and seeing what it gave back to me.
A futuristic city inspired by Tokyo with neon signs, flying cars and tall buildings. Its night time and it's raining. Drains on the road are overfilling with water. There is a man on the street with a tabby cat in his backpack. lighting: Moonlight, street lights and lights from buildings. Artstation, unreal engine.
Below are the images MidJourney popped out for me.
This is similar but not what I was imagining, I wanted the main character closer to the foreground on the right side of the image and I wanted flying cars. So I kept updating and changing my prompt until it got as close to my imagination as I could get it.
After several more attempts, this is as close as I could get it. The cat looks odd here and is not in his backpack like I wanted it to be. There are also no flying cars. To get this closer to what I wanted I could make the background without the main character, put it into procreate and re-imagine the main character and add flying cars to the air. I like the background and this would take me some time to do from scratch.
I will be using MidJourney in the future to aid my art journey and for fun, however, it does not give me the satisfaction of creating my own art from scratch, and it doesn't make me proud or make me think it is skilful.
For fun, I did a similar prompt but in my line art style. This is cool but still not ME.
