-: All right.
What are Midjourney's capabilities and limitations?
What's good about it and what's bad?
One cool thing is that it's built into Discord
into the community tool.
Similar to Slack. You type in your prompt,
it's /imagine,
and then whatever your prompt is.
And that makes it easier in some ways.
Like you can use it on mobile pretty easily.
And you can also click to upscale
or click on the variance as well.
It's community first because it's built into Discord.
Every single member, you know, of every single user
of Midjourney is a member of this platform.
And because, you know,
because you get a lot of people posting in there, you get
to see a lot of variation in terms of like
what prompts are working for different people.
And you can just take those prompts
and then copy them as well.
So it's a real hotbed of innovation.
One cool thing you can do is you can add a base image
into the prompt.
So you can provide a kind of an example,
and that tends to really improve performance of the prompts.
You can also do image blending, so this is kind of unique.
You can just give it two different images
and blend them together.
I found that that can be quite powerful.
Negative prompting is really key.
It's something you can't do in DALL-E,
but you can do, in Stable Diffusion,
you can remove different elements.
So in this example, we've got Peppa Pig,
a children's cartoon,
but we've stripped
out the cartoon aspect
and got this kind of nice fluffy toy instead.
Here are weighted terms, so this is, you know, kind
of like a bit more fine-grained, you know, control
over the prompt.
Similar to negative prompts.
Like if you put minus one,
then that'd be the same as negative.
But you know, here we blended a little bit of Van Gogh
and the, and you know,
and some Picasso to kind of get the ultimate style
that we wanted, which is kind of interesting.
And then we also have a lot of model settings.
So you know, you can choose which version you're using.
So if you wanna scale back to an older version,
they're all very different.
Like v5.0 is a lot more realistic,
v4.0 is a lot more cinematic,
and they have a few different other styles and modes,
but it does have some limitations.
So one thing that, I guess it could be a positive
or a negative is that it tends
to have this fantasy aesthetic.
So everything comes out, you know, relatively like fairytale
or video gamey.
And I think that that's likely to stay just
because the community itself rates the images
and the community, I think the early community were a lot
of like digital artists
and game designers, things like that.
So it's kind of had that look
and feel, it looks like something
from Deviant Art or Art Station.
The other thing that it doesn't do very well still is kind
of like faces and hands.
In some cases, like if you ask
for a model, it always looks too polished and perfect.
The hands themselves tend to be pretty bad,
although that is better in v5.0.
You know, this is like a pretty interesting image,
but you know, you can tend
to see the faces look really scary,
not, you know, not particularly realistic.
Occasionally you just have the,
like a really odd thing happening like, you know,
this woman's weird face here,
or you know, this woman like facing the wrong
way from the MacBook.
So yeah, still some issues.
There's no API available unfortunately,
so this is really only a consumer tool.
You can't really use it
to, you know, use it programmatically for anything.
But other than that,
like I think Midjourney is like a very good tool to use.
It's surprising actually how well it's done
considering it doesn't have the funding
of OpenAI or, you know, the open source.
It doesn't benefit from open source
like Stability does Stable Diffusion.
So yeah, I think this is, it's carved out really niche.
I think the community has driven it forward
and we'll continue to drive it forward in the future.