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Midjourney AI Guide
- LeoPanthera 4y agoI don't know. Stable Diffusion runs locally. It feels really weird to run this kind of thing on someone else's computer. Especially when the only interface is via Discord! I continue to refuse to join Discord. It's an archivists nightmare.
- MattRix 4y agoYou can join discord just to use Midjourney. It’s really mot that big of a deal.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- exodust 4y agoTried to sign up, but won't bother after they falsely claimed a "security issue with my browser" and then demanded a phone number on that basis. I hate this hostile, intrusive UX pattern. I verified my email, I never use VPN, and my browser's ad blockers were disabled. Yet they claim "security issue". Discord can shove their dishonesty. And yes I tried one of those free number websites but didn't work because millions of other people use those same numbers.
- mmahemoff 4y agoEvery month or two, I have a need to login to Discord for something like MJ. Discord's whole login sequence is more painful than any other website ever created. It has multiple borderline-crazy CAPTCHA challenges and still makes you verify by email and/or phone. This is on the same browser and device I logged into a month or two ago. I don't get anything like this from other services on the same device.
- Turing_Machine 4y ago> Especially when the only interface is via Discord! I hate to be one of those guys who bandies the term "UX" around, but yeah, that's terrible UX. I'm willing to put up with it for v5, though. My local install of SD just doesn't measure up, at least not at present.
- famouswaffles 4y agoYeah Base SD is pretty bad. That said, the new Kandinsky 2.1 model is really good. Much better than any of the base SD models and is open source. Try that some time Bing image creator is also really good and free with a hundred generations per day
- robbintt 4y agoSo everyone but some archivists are using it? Hack the system my friend
- cavisne 4y agoThe founder gave an interesting interview about this. In short when they did user testing with a Web UI, people would write a basic prompt "dog", "cat" and then get stuck. Discord makes it social by default, you can see what people are prompting and get inspiration. I also found it a bit weird, but now that ive onboarded its great having a multi platform native experience (ie even chatgpt still has no mobile apps).
- dr_kiszonka 4y agoI agree that the social learning component is very useful. Initially, I was taken aback that they force you to use discord but it is great for learning from others.
- computershit 4y agoI don't know anyone who's used Midjourney more than a day and stuck around in one of the newbies channels; pretty much everyone slides into the bot's DMs. The social angle is not what's fueling Midjourney's success. The quality of its output certainly is.
- Mashimo 4y agoSome friends invites the Midjourney bot into our own discord server. And sometimes we mess around with it. It's kinda fun this way.
- roenxi 4y agoI dunno, even if it only matters for a couple of hours starting out, those hours might easily be critical. There are many technically strong products that fail because they didn't know how to get users to take those first timid steps.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoDiscord is actually a really great experience for power users. I can generate new image sets as fast as I can type because MJ's Discord bot takes care of everything else for me. Are there SD applications that have UX as good as that?
- asynchronous 4y agoRunning locally I can get SD’s webui to spit out images in about 6-10s on my hardware.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoOk, but I can queue up 5+ prompts in the same timeframe using MJ. Being able to concurrently test lots of prompts is really nice.
- asynchronous 4y agoYeah, I can also queue prompts and do things like X/Y plots and matrices. Also SD is free. But I’m not saying one is better than the other, I think they each have pros/cons, just wanted to list numbers for the curious.
- jutrewag 4y agoBut then you have to scroll through the entire chat to find your images (unless there’s an east way to jump to your results without trawling through the whole thing).
- kashunstva 4y agoThere’s a tab for notifications/mentions that shows only your output.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoI created a private server solely for the purpose of playing with MJ.
- 4y ago
- aenvoker 4y ago> It's an archivists nightmare. I’m guessing you are referring to archive.org style public archiving. But, I’ll mention anyway that for your own generations there is a web interface to search and bulk download your images. And, a web interface is in the works. You lose out on the social aspect of prompting with friends. But, gain some UX for working solo. Or, you can work solo in a DM convo with the bot.
- epivosism 4y agoRepo for my C# bot which you can use to download (and annotate) all your creations. https://github.com/ernop/social-ai/ https://github.com/ernop/social-ai/
- asynchronous 4y agoSuper agree on the Discord point. Feels foreign to run an entire business model by relying on a third party chat service.
- guiambros 4y ago> It's an archivists nightmare. My experience has been exactly the opposite. I created my own Discord "server" (which is not truly a server per se; more like your server account [1]), and then installed MJ bot. This way I can keep all my creations in a single place, with the added benefit that I have my own channels for things like compilation of links, prompts database, separate channels for different types of creations, and so on. I even invited a couple of family members to join my Discord server, so they can use MJ if they want, without having to share my Discord account (but of course it still counts towards my MJ credits). All in all, I have been incredibly (and surprisingly) pleased with Discord experience. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDPY_bMPO0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDPY_bMPO0A
- iand 4y agoI have done this too. How did you get the bot to use your MJ credits? I found that the bot still uses the credits of each person who invokes the command.
- guiambros 4y agoOh interesting, I assumed their usage was counting towards my credits, but I actually didn't check, so maybe I'm wrong. Will test and report back.
- guiambros 4y agoI'll take it back. I tested and you're right: it was using the caller's account, not the person who owns the server. So it doesn't share your MJ credits in any way. There must be a way of creating a Discord bot wrapper which holds your credentials, but on a quick search I wasn't able to find anything. What a big bummer. That would be the ideal environment.
- lumenwrites 4y agoWow! Thank you so much for sharing this, this is such a fantastic idea! It will be so much more convenient to use midjourney from now on!
- jutrewag 4y agoMidjourney v5 is like magic though. Imo stable diffusion doesn’t even come close.
- realusername 4y agoThere's a lot of Stable Diffusion models though, I would say the opposite, it's hard to compete for Midjourney when you have 20 different competing fined-tuned Stable Diffusion models depending on what you want along with ControlNet, automatic1111 & comfyui.
- mdorazio 4y agoI agree with the parent comment. The quality of output images from MJ v5 is vastly better than anything I’ve been able to get out of SD regardless of which tuning model I’ve tried. SD’s underlying model on top of which everything is built just isn’t that good.
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoSeem about the same if you know how to use them imho. I’ll say one thing Midjourney images are always way more “basic” in terms of aesthetic. Everything looks like the Artstation front page, which while very competent is tacky look.
- drcongo 4y agoDiscord is all kinds of nightmares. Every time I open it I have to close multiple popovers trying to sell me things, something about "Nitro", stuff about running my own Discord etc. Then there's the fact that there's red dots on channels that I've never been in and there's no way of working out why I have a red dot on there or viewing just my mentions. I hate it.
- atleastoptimal 4y agoThe crazy thing about generative AI models is they provide a service that's significantly better in both price/output and bests possible output. In addition to being able to create completely novel, high quality images, they can do so at speeds that no human could ever hope to match. And image models of this quality have only been around for a year, imagine where they'll be in five. I empathize will all the artists who feel cheated out of these models training on all their data, but the sad reality is these AI models are just far too useful to ever go away. The world's standards for art and text have gone up faster than they ever have in world history over the course of the last 10 months
- gumballindie 4y agoThey’ve got electrolytes.
- cyanydeez 4y agoCounterpoint: they only generate novel differentiation but won't generate new detailed products. This basically means you get thousands of different nostalgic triggering visuals but it's a visual trick the same way marvel movies all follow the same premise and eventually satiate the space.
- atleastoptimal 4y agoMarvel movies however make more money on average than any other kind of movie. If that's where the money is, that's where the capital efforts of artistic creation will tend towards. Whether the art is trite or original is up to the highest brow critics to determine.
- incrudible 4y agoOnce you arrive at Ant Man 3, the box office lemon has been squeezed. There is far more money in serialized content, which is also where all the creativity goes.
- PradeetPatel 4y ago
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoThat's a good guide. It's worth highlighting that, even in v5, the best results are obtained with fairly complicated prompts. These results, for instance: https://imgur.com/RD7fF3M https://imgur.com/RD7fF3M Are what came up via: The interior of a future-brutalist megastructure. Single image comics style sci-fi robotic architecture, 70s, jet era Jetson cantilever modular space station modules, flag patch on walls, pastel glowing symbols, sci-fi towers architecture, foggy, pastel volumetric light and atmosphere, glass and steel pastel, The 5th element, The Matrix, Blade Runner, photography award, ultra elegant wide angle, volumetric light at mid day nice sky, trending on artstation, Unreal engine hyper realistic photography magazine cover, no people --v 5 --q 2 --upbeta
- MattRix 4y agoI don’t think those results are actually any better than what can be achieved with much more simple prompts. This seems like an example of the “Ikea effect”, where when once you’ve put in effort to assemble something, you perceive it to have more value.
- rainytuesday 4y agoYou can just use the /describe prompt and reverse engineer something you like, or you can have ChatGPT do it for you.
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoStrongly disagree. These are 3 sets I just generated with v5 using the following simplified version of your prompt: "interior of a future-brutalist megastructure, comic pastel style, sci-fi robotic architecture, 70s". https://imgur.com/a/cGgz9nl https://imgur.com/a/cGgz9nl MJ does really well with simple prompts. Specific words and phrases that accurately translate what you want into the latent space are way more important than complex prompts. If you've played around with MJ much you'll know what I mean. Some words and phrases overpower everything else in the prompt. I've found that good MJ prompts are very vibe based.
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoDamn, you're right.
- xnx 4y agoIs the latest Midjourney now considered better than Stable Diffusion? If so, will Stable Diffusion catch up? I strongly prefer the open source nature and ability to run locally of Stable Diffusion.
- furyofantares 4y agoIt's been noticeably better than Stable Diffusion since v3 at least (I wasn't paying attention before that). It's on v5 now, and I think MJ has continued to get better faster than SD through this time period. ControlNet for Stable Diffusion may be an exception to this.
- echelon 4y agoI think that's the popular consensus. Both StabilityAI and the open source community are working on improvements to Stable Diffusion. Keep in mind StabilityAI is also pursuing LLMs and the host of other model types, whereas text to image is Midjourney's single core competency and value prop. Midjourney is very focused on staying ahead. edit: I wanted to add that the extensive training costs can be prohibitive for the OSS community to fully participate. Coordination via groups such as LAION can help, but gone are the days of individual OSS participants contributing directly to core foundational model training.
- simonw 4y agoMidjourney provides much better images by default. It's really impressive. Stable Diffusion's advantage is in the huge amount of open source activity around it. Most recently that resulted in ControlNet, which is far more powerful than anything Midjourney can currently do - if you know how to use it. https://github.com/lllyasviel/ControlNet https://github.com/lllyasviel/ControlNet
- danielmoller 4y agoI've played around with v5 and it generates some insane images. Vast improvement over the early days in Sept 2022 when Stable Diffusion had just come out as well, and Midjourney still had lots of room for improvement. Excited for what V6 will bring.
- aschearer 4y agoThis was worth it just to discover https://promptbase.com/ https://promptbase.com/ -- feels like I'm seeing the future! Bonkers!
- ZephyrBlu 4y agoThose prompts look crazy expensive. I would personally price the vast majority of prompts at <<$1.
- aschearer 4y agoI have no opinion on that, but my first reaction was "this is silly." My second reaction was, "this will be a future job/product."
- exodust 4y agoFurther up this thread someone reduced a complicated prompt to a simple one with similar results. > "If you're good at prompt engineering" Now that's funny. Promptbase.com thinks writing silly prompts is engineering! Prompt phrases like "photography award" are silly. May as well add "best image in the universe" or "really really really good" etc. Calling it "prompt engineering" is laughable. Selling prompts even more laughable.
- nickthegreek 4y agoOr save a few of the example photos and use midjourney's /describe <url> to get something close.
- quickthrower2 4y agoMakes NFTs look even more dumb ha ha when you can do this.
- anonyfox 4y agohere I am, $50 spent roughly just to read a few "professional" prompts I can steal from and modify :-)
- yieldcrv 4y agoprotip: you can feed midjourney guided to chatgpt and it will make amazing prompts sorry aspiring prompt engineers, AI can do that too
- dantk 4y agoI've done this and have gotten great results. I made a base prompt that includes all of midjourneys documentation, and as gpt gives me prompts I plug them into midjourney and each of them a rating. I'd like to know if you've done something similar or if you have different methods
- totetsu 4y agoGPT LLMs etc are designed to output strings that look like real language, and follow rules of grammar and word constructions etc that are used by people. Image generating models can be manipulated by using prompts with all kinds of strange combinations of words and letters that would never come out of a language generating model.
- flangola7 4y ago>all kinds of strange combinations of words and letters that would never come out of a language generating model. My experience with LLaMA has shown me this is definitely not the case.
- totetsu 4y agoI see. Well to clarify my point. I use slight missellings or concstinations or repetitions or specific word orders or layers of completely different concepts to great effect to pull and nudge the current image generators. This is just an intuitive feedback loop, that follows the logic of the images being generated, it's a new way to use language and letters. I can't imagine a llm can do this with purpose
- famouswaffles 4y agoBut..it can lol. That's kind of the point. Show an example(s) of what you're going for you're good to go.
- franze 4y agotaking currently a deep dive into midjourney and I found the most interesting results can be found by a) combining artists i.e.: by Rafal Olbinski in the style of frank frazetta b) combining artists and photographers i.e.: by Rafal Olbinski photographed by Helmut Newton c) turning artists into photographers i.e.: photographed by Frank Frazetta d) limits limits limit i.e.: only in orange and yellow some of the things I did can be found https://instagram.com/f_r_a_n_z_ai?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= https://instagram.com/f_r_a_n_z_ai?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y= here (but most in the vanishing Stories as I did not but them into squares yet)
- niwrad 4y agoI feel that Midjourney v5 really lets you explore different worlds. One recent feature the guide missed is the permutation and repeat features [1]. They're quite helpful for power users that want to explore multiple styles quickly. Last week I tried putting together a short film using GPT-4 and Midjourney v5. I was stunned by the cinematic frames Midjourney v5 was able to create: https://youtu.be/6O_tOuUcG9s https://youtu.be/6O_tOuUcG9s I (human) wrote the prompts for Midjourney, though. [1] https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/permutations https://docs.midjourney.com/docs/permutations
- JanSt 4y agoImpressive. Thanks for sharing
- Robby2023 4y agowow I had no idea about permutations in Midjourney and it's an amazing feature! thank you very much!!
- Paul-Craft 4y agoDamn. It's no Harry Potter by Balenciaga, but it's surprisingly compelling given that most of it was generated (granted, with prompting) by AI tools. I notice you credited GPT-4, Midjourney, and Metavoice, but was the music AI generated as well? I've gotta say, I've seen worse storytelling and cinematography come from actual, serious humans who were getting paid to do it. And the Balenciaga thing is obviously a joke, because that whole genre only works because the style of those videos is beyond parody and sails right over the uncanny valley. This is different. This is interesting. I like it.
- niwrad 4y agoThanks for your kind comments! I'm glad you pointed out the music. The music was also AI generated with a tool called AIVA [1]. I'd never composed a piece of music before, and I was pretty surprised by what I could "create". I spent 30~60 minutes max creating the score. Some parts of their product still feel janky, but as an overall concept, it's quite fascinating. One of the interactions I enjoyed was that AIVA creates scores with different tracks (layers). So I was able to edit tracks I don't like (e.g., change a Piano track to Brass) or have AIVA completely regenerate certain sections of the score (e.g., redo the bridge, regenerate the chorus sections). One difference from Midjourney is that there's no text-based prompting. Instead, you "prompt" through music inspiration. [1] https://www.aiva.ai/ https://www.aiva.ai/
- kiru_io 4y agoI found this Google Sheets linked on one of the sites, it was more useful for me than the actual site: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cm6239gw1XvvDMRtazV6txa9pnejpKkM5z24wRhhFz0/edit#gid=1057933666 https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1cm6239gw1XvvDMRtazV6...
- thelazyone 4y agoI wonder how accurate this approach is. One thing is being trained on someone's art, another is getting hints from the rest of the whole collective knowledge of how that artist works. checking the V5 tab I almost immediately found Akira Toriyama, and the art is ... well, sure on one of the four drawings there are some Goku-like hair on ...some cheeks (not the face ones) drawn in the style of Terry Gilliam? Then of course, for older artists the match is much stronger, and for some of the modern and famous ones too. But it seems to me that the whole method could be heavily biased.