-: Welcome to "Intro to Midjourney."
It's an image generation model,
similar to Stable Diffusion or DALL-E,
and you can see how that works here.
This takes a lot of random images from the internet,
like pictures of cats, adds a little bit of noise
to the image until eventually it's all noise.
It's just random kind of pixels on the screen.
Once it trains enough on those images,
and it knows what the caption and image pair is,
then you can reverse the process,
and you just take some random noise
and then turn it into the image that matches that caption.
The caption is the prompt that you're giving it.
So Midjourney works a little bit different.
It's actually created through an independent research lab,
so it doesn't have like all the crazy funding
and resources that OpenAI has.
It also, you know, doesn't have all the kind
of free contribution that Stable Diffusion gets
from being open source,
but it's still managed to grow pretty rapidly.
And the reason why, I think,
is through the Discord community.
So in order to use the platform,
you actually have to be in Discord,
which is like similar to Slack if you don't know.
And there are millions of people in there
creating prompts every day.
You know, when you pay, you can prompt the bot directly.
So it's a Midjourney bot that you can DM,
but also all of the prompts get posted
into different channels.
You can actually, if you are a paying customer,
then hide your images.
But it's community first by default.
It's a monthly subscription,
if you are a paying customer, after a free trial.
So pretty simple, easy business model,
and apparently they're already profitable.
So, that's a very interesting, unexpected outcome.
So a few things that are interesting about Midjourney.
One is it has negative prompts,
and, you know, that can get horrifying quickly.
Like in this case, I took Peppa Pig,
which is a popular cartoon my daughter likes,
and then I added dash dash no.
And then after a dash dash no, I put cartoon.
So anything after dash dash no is a negative prompt,
something you don't want.
So it is giving you Peppa Pig, which is normally a cartoon,
but turning it into like a photorealistic Peppa Pig.
You can upscale.
So, you know, after every set of image generations here,
it tells you, you know, which one do you wanna upscale,
or do you wanna regenerate, or do you want new versions
of one of the ones that you liked?
So if I clicked V4, it would generate new versions
of version four, or if I click upscale,
then it generates the fuller image here.
Then you can also do image blending,
which I think is pretty unique.
You can take two images and mix 'em together.
In this case, I put like a pastoral village scene
from the UK and then kind of blended it
with this image to make kind of a nice Peppa Pig
that's not, that's in like a lovely village
rather than like this horror show.
The aesthetic of Midjourney is like very fantasy.
So this is that pastoral village scene
that I created with Midjourney as well.
It's really, it looks like a video game, right?
Or like a movie or, you know, kind of like one
of those kind of unreal engine-generated things.
And you know, this is an example of I just put in,
you know, test tubes, right, and it came up with this,
like it's a very fantasy kind of vision
of what a test tube is.
Same thing here.
This is a pair of shoes
that are designed in the style of "Alien Predator."
So this is either a blessing or a curse
depending on if you like this aesthetic.
Like if you are designing AI art,
then this is the type of thing
that gets a lot of clicks and views,
but it might not be good for every type of task.
The types of tasks that I've used it for specifically,
or I've seen other people use it for,
one, is book art.
So, you have, this is actually some illustration that I made
for a book that I'm writing of like a samurai
in a futuristic city.
You know, this is a stock photo, right?
Well, it's actually not really a stock photo.
I generated it with Midjourney,
but it kind of matches the type of thing
that I would use on my blog for a stock photo.
So the cool thing is then it's unique to me, right?
As a paying customer of Midjourney, I own this image, right?
Like I can use it on my blog,
and I don't have to pay for like a copyright license fee.
And then movie characters.
So this is something I've seen a lot of people do,
is they're creating like whole movies or kind of cartoons
or comics using Midjourney,
and it's really good at this out of the box.
And you know, I think Midjourney, in general,
is one of those tools that nobody expected
to kind of still be in the running,
but they have kind of self-selected
on this type of this aesthetic.
They've also done really well
with, like, building a community
and kind of engaging that community.
So, you know, I predict it's gonna be here to stay
for a long time, and really helpful for you
to learn how to use it.