#ThursdayTool - Midjourney

Music Service Profile: Midjourney

Name: Midjourney

Description: AI art generator

Synopsis:

Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence program and service created and hosted by San Francisco-based independent research lab Midjourney, Inc. Midjourney generates images from natural language descriptions, called "prompts", similar to OpenAI's DALL-E and Stability AI's Stable Diffusion.

The tool is currently in open beta, which it entered on July 12, 2022. The Midjourney team is led by David Holz, who co-founded Leap Motion. Holz told The Register in August 2022 that the company was already profitable. Users create artwork with Midjourney using Discord bot commands.

Founder David Holz says he sees artists as customers, not competitors of Midjourney. Holz told The Register that artists use Midjourney for rapid prototyping of artistic concepts to show to clients before starting work themselves. Some artists have accused Midjourney of devaluing original creative work by using it in the training set; Midjourney's terms of service includes a DMCA takedown policy, allowing artists to request their work to be removed from the set if they believe copyright infringement to be evident.

The advertising industry has been quick to embrace AI tools such as Midjourney, DALL-E, and Stable Diffusion, among others. The tools, which enable advertisers to create original content and brainstorm ideas quickly are providing new opportunities such as "custom ads created for individuals, a new way to create special effects, or even making e-commerce advertising more efficient", according to Ad Age.

Architects have described using the software to generate mood boards for the early stages of projects, as an alternative to searching Google Images.

Developer(s)

Midjourney, Inc.

Initial release

July 12, 2022

Website

www.midjourney.com