Inspired by images of the universe recently published by NASA, the first message that fed in the Midjourney Research Laboratory’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool it was “a spaceship surrounded by galaxies.” The result, as shown below, was an image of a ship suspended in space that seems to reflect the cosmos around it, quite true to the indication.
A spaceship surrounded by galaxies (Credit: Midjourney)
For Midjourney founder David Holz, a powerful aspect of generative AI is its “ability to unify with language,” where we can “use language as a tool to create things.” In simple terms, generative AI uses user commands to create novel images based on the set of data it has learned from different sources over time.
The rise of text-to-image generation has also raised philosophical questions about the definition of “artist”.
British mathematician Marcus du Sautoy argues in his book The Creativity Code (Art and Innovation in the Age of AI), 2019, “Art is ultimately an expression of human free will and until computers have their own version From this, art created by a computer will always be traceable to the human desire to create. He claims that if we were to create a “mind” in a machine, perhaps it would offer a glimpse into its thoughts. “But we are still a long way from creating conscious code,” du Sautoy concludes.
Similarly, Holz notes, “It’s important that we don’t think of this as an AI ‘artist’. We think of it more like using AI to augment our imaginations. It is not necessarily about art but about imagining. We are asking, ‘what if’. AI increases the power of our imagination.”
Midjourney allows its users to feed their notices into their Discord server and then generates four text-like images. The user can choose to explore more variations and improve the perfect fit to a higher quality image. The bot entered open beta last month, giving users a certain number of free trials to bring their imagination to life. The generated images can also be minted into NFTs, for which, until recently, Midjourney collected royalties.
“It is a giant community of almost a million people who create images together, dream and joke with each other. All prompts are public and everyone can see everyone else’s images…that’s pretty unique,” says Holz. indianexpress.com.
Holz co-founded Leap Motion, a hand-tracking motion-capture user interface company, in 2010, and appeared on the 2014 Forbes 30 under 30 list. He now runs a small, self-funded research and design lab, Midjourney, which is exploring a bunch of various projects, including AI visualization tool, with 10 other colleagues.
On the response received by the AI bot, Holz says: “Many people are very happy and find using the product a deeply emotional experience. People use it for everything from a project to art therapy. There are people who have always had things on their minds but were not able to express them before. Some people have conditions like aphantasia, where the mind can’t visualize things, and now they’re using the bot to visualize for the first time in their lives. A lot of beautiful things are happening.”
The bot is also responsible for preventing the misuse of the platform to generate offensive images. The community guidelines urge users to refrain from using ads that are “inherently disrespectful, aggressive, or abusive,” as well as generate “gore or adult content.” Midjourney also makes use of moderators who watch for people who violate the policies and give them a warning or ban them. It also has automated content moderation where certain words are banned on the server. The AI also learns from user data, Holz explains. “If people don’t like something, they generate less of it.”
I stumbled across the Midjourney bot during a quick look at my Twitter feed, where I saw the user’s psychedelhic interpretations of a somewhat post-apocalyptic Delhi.
Having previously dabbled with AI bots like Disco Diffusion and Craiyon, an interesting aspect of discovering Midjourney was looking at how different AIs would respond to the same texts. The following images show the results generated with the same prompt, ‘city during monsoon rains’, by Midjourney, Disco Diffusion, a free to use AI tool hosted by Google Colab and Craiyon, formerly known as DALL-E mini.
A city during the monsoon rains (Credit: Craiyon)
A city during the monsoon rains (Credit: Disco Diffusion)
A city during the monsoon rains (Credit: Midjourney)
While Craiyon throws up relatively realistic images, Disco Diffusion shows surreal and impressionistic results, and Midjourney falls a bit in the middle of the two.
According to Holz, Midjourney can be understood as a “playful and imaginative sandbox”. “The goal is to give everyone access to that sandbox, so everyone can understand what is possible and where we are as a civilization. What can we do? What does this mean for the future?”
Holz dismisses fears that AI is here to “replace” humans or their jobs. “When computer graphics was invented, similar questions arose: Will this replace artists? And he hasn’t. If anything, computer graphics make artists more powerful,” he says.
Holz adds, “Every time we see something new, there’s a temptation to try to figure out if it’s dangerous and we treat it like a tiger. AI is not a tiger. It is actually more like a great river of water. A tiger is dangerous in a very different way than water. Water is something you can build a boat for, you can learn to swim, or you can create dams that produce electricity. He’s not trying to eat us, he’s not mad at us. He doesn’t have any emotions or feelings or thoughts. It’s like a powerful force. It’s an opportunity.”