No-one on the internet can have failed to notice the sudden surge in AI Art. I first saw some Dall-E 3 x3 blocks appearing a few months back, and when i tried to find it, i ended up on Craiyon.com trying my hand at some very basics…
And my god, are the possibilities endless.
all fine so good, but small images, low rez, but at least you get the option of which image is “better”. Oh my, was that short lived. While Craiyon and Dall-E are still around, the computing power required to generate these is pretty hefty, and Dall-E and Dall-E 2 are both requiring applications for access to get to the juicy stuff.
and then i saw some absolutely stunning looking artwork appearing on some of the feeds which blew the slightly shonky Craiyon images away.
Enter Stage: Right (#MidJourney)
This sounded as if it’d be difficult to gain access to, but all that’s actually required was joining their Discord channel and you can get off to a flying start with some basic prompts. joining *any* of their channels to see the jobs in progress is an eclectic look at what’s going on in the brains of da yoof these days, with such conjunctions as Russian Propaganda Posters of Darth Vader, to Donald Trump as a “dancing queen”. It’s so utterly bizarre, but so stunning.
I haven’t got a hope in hell of ever drawing anything this cool. so, the bottom left one is a bit shonky but otherwise I can pick any of them to upscale. Currently “upscaling” is limited to 1664×1664 max, but that’s still more than good enough for Instagra, or other social media.
It picks up artist styles quite well, such as Jack Vettriano, H. R. Giger, Turner and so on.
According to the licencing statement, anything generated is yours, not theirs. Is this the end of “art” as a product, or will we just hammer something into an AI engine and get that hung on our walls? I’m already contemplating some of my Midjourney pics getting poster printed…
Watching some of the prompts flying by in the Midjourney Discord channels, I’d say there’s a fair amount of “project” artwork being generated for either nothing, or next to nothing (personal paid accounts go from $10 a month to $30 a month), and considering commissioned artwork prices, they’re getting a bargain. You just need the patience to fine tune your prompt, settings and a little bit of luck to get the right “look”.
So, sorry, but I’m going to be burying myself ina discord bottle for a while…