Artificial intelligence or artificial intelligence has more than its fair share of the “15 minutes of fame” moment (often attributed to Andy Warhol). While the rise of AI and machine learning was a decades long effort, the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT service has sparked things up in a massive way. Midjourney is an AI art generation service launched in the middle of 2022 and you may have seen the images floating around the internet.
The claim for this picture was “15 minutes of fame” and Midjourney brought back this creative set of 4.
In my post on advanced routers, The success of ChatGPT depends entirely on your routerIt definitely generated some conversations for me on social media. It’s all positive, but I know some people aren’t very happy about AI in education, work (resumes), and a bunch of fields. Many artists are very angry, and rightly so in some cases, with Midjourney.
However, these two posts from Forbes Contributor Rob Salkowitz can quickly update you on some of the company’s developments and an interview with Midjourney founder and CEO David Holz.
Midjourney uses Discord as a delivery/creation mechanism – meaning you need to have or create a Discord account to even try the service. Quickly, Discord is a place to talk and hang out. It started for players wanting to talk (voice or text chat) while in the middle of a game. Caught It and many other groups are using the platform to connect with others.
when you go to Medjourney On the homepage, you’ll see a “Join Beta” button which takes you to a new “Continue to Discord” screen which launches the app where you can sign up for the service. Once you do, it lets you into the web-based Discord or you can download the desktop app (recommended) and you are now in the community and able to start creating artwork and photos.
Midjourney’s service is free for a set number of photos (I think it’s still 25, but those are fast) and then it’s $10 for 200 (those are fast too), $30 per month for an unlimited number and well worth the money if you plan on doing any serious creation.
It can be more than just confusing in Discord, so here’s the key thing to know: In the left navigation column (as shown in the screenshot below) there are rooms labeled “#newbies-179” or starters with another number.
- Step 1: You need to click on a section for beginners to be able to really use the service, i.e. to get a prompt where you can enter words to describe the image you want. Click on “newbies-179” and then go to the main section of the window on the right.
- Step 2: You’ll see an open box where you can type/imagine – that’s a forward slash and the word imagine, then press space or tab, which will create another small prompt area with a blinking cursor.
First steps to using Midjourney in the Discord app.
The screenshot shows my prompt which originally would have looked like this:
Midjourney is a visual prompt
After writing/imagining, press tab or space again, which opens the “Prompt” area and a smaller black window where you can start writing your creative idea.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing more quick tip posts about Midjourney that I either received or discovered through a lot of trial and error. It’s so much fun to create pictures and art if you feel like you’ve never been a creative person who can sketch, sketch and paint your way to success. Midjourney makes this possible in a wide variety of ways.
For now, just write/imagine and whatever catches your eye and you’ll get a creative version of what you ordered. The Discord discussion moves quickly until your image is tucked away in the chat area, so keep scrolling until you find it.