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Write Your Dream and Let It Come to Life
“We like to say that we are trying to broaden the imagination of the human species. The goal is not to make creative machines, but to make people more creative, which I think is an important distinction.” David Holz | Founder and CEO of MidjourneyNeşe BİNARK
August 14, 2024
Photograph of Midjourney Founder and CEO David Holz and his illustration created by Midjourney
Difficulty in design: “It is easy to make things difficult, it is difficult to simplify them”
I met Midjourney when I came across an interview with David Holz by Rob Salkowitz, a Will Eisner Comics Industry Award-nominated comics journalist and writer, for the American business magazine “Forbes”. I learned that founded in 2021, Midjourney is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) powered platform that allows users to create unique works of art such as characters, images, and depictions through short text prompts. I researched it, read interviews, examined the created visuals, and became a member of Midjourney. I have experienced how artificial intelligence is used and am sharing it with you writing this article.
A historical selfie of a group of Jewish men, all dressed in traditional battle garb, each smiling directly at the camera, made with Midjourney V6
The emergence of Midjourney
Midjourney's founder, David Holz, started designing during his high school years. He studied applied mathematics and physics at the University of North Carolina. He signed a contract with NASA's Langley Research Center and conducted neuroscience research at the Max Planck Institute. He worked on a Doctorate in fluid mechanics while working at NASA and Max Planck. He suddenly became depressed and left his doctorate and moved to San Francisco. He founded a technology company called Leap Motion in 2011. David Holz, CTO “Chief Technology Officer” and Founding Partner of Leap Motion, the world's most advanced hand-tracking technology, defines himself as a serial entrepreneur. Leap Motion manufactures and markets a computer hardware sensor device that supports hand and finger movements, similar to a mouse but does not require hand contact or touch.
David Holz, who had run the company for twelve years, looked for a different environment than a large venture-backed company. He left Leap Motion to start Midjourney. The Midjourney rendering platform first entered open beta on July 12, 2022. The company tried to improve its algorithms by releasing new model versions every few months. On December 21, 2023, the alpha iteration of Midjourney V6 was released. The model was trained from scratch over a period of nine months. Support for better text presentation and a more realistic interpretation of prompts was added to it. One of Holz's team members suggested branding the model with a robot symbol. Instead, Holz set out with a simple boat design. The boat logo symbolizes that they are in the middle of a journey. The bot acts as a tool between users and the world they want to see. Holz decided the prompts would start by typing /imagine.
Midjourney's success is largely based on Holz's personal philosophy of divergent thinking. David Holz, the founder and CEO of Midjourney, comments on the benefit of this text-to-image technology for business and society: “I'm definitely more interested in society than business. We're a consumer product, but right now maybe 30 to 50% of our users are professionals. Not the majority. Artists on the platform tell us that this allowed them to be more creative and exploratory in the beginning, coming up with a lot of ideas in a short time” (Forbes).
An Orthodox Jewish woman praying
"We want the world to be more creative and we'd rather make beautiful things than ugly things"
“I personally don't think the world needs more deepfakes, but it does need more beautiful things, so we focused on making everything beautiful and artistic-looking.” David Holz
“Midjourney V6,” an artificial intelligence program that produces visual content, promises to earn thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars per month in the near future for artists who can express their creativity by writing. This artificial intelligence program, which creates images from textual descriptions, was used by the British magazine The Economist to create the front cover of a June 2022 issue. In August 2022, Italy's leading newspaper, Corriere della Sera, published a graphic novel created by author Vanni Santoni with Midjourney. Charlie Warzel used Midjourney to create two images of Alex Jones for his newsletter, The Atlantic. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver included a 10-minute segment from Midjourney in an episode that aired in August 2022. A Mid-Journey image called Théâtre D'opéra Spatial won first place in a digital art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair. Jason Allen, who wrote the prompt that led Midjourney to produce the image, printed the image on a canvas and entered the contest through Midjourney using the name Jason M. Allen. In December 2022, Midjourney was used, to create images in an AI-generated children's book, only over a weekend. The book, titled Alice and Sparkle, tells the story of a young girl who builds a self-aware robot. In 2023, the realness of AI-based text-to-image renderers such as Midjourney, DALL-E, or Stable Diffusion reached such a high level that it led to a significant wave of viral AI.
An old Jewish man is quite happy while eating pizza
How to use Midjourney V6?
Midjourney V6 can only be accessed through a “discord bot” on their official discord, by messaging the bot directly, or by inviting the bot to a third-party server. Users create images with Midjourney V6 using discord bot commands. To create an image, users issue the '/imagine' command and write the short story they want to convert into an image in English. The bot in return creates a set of four images for the user. Users can choose which images they want to upgrade, or they can give a new command and want a new image to be produced. It is important to be able to describe in detail, using sentences at a time, and use the '/blend' command that allows the user to blend two images, the '/shorten' command that allows the user to get suggestions on how to shorten a long prompt, and other commands that enhance the Midjourney experience, all at the same time. This artificial intelligence software works with a membership system. Each image created is deducted from the number of images you have the right to produce monthly. Your imagination determines the limit of what you can do. In order to translate your imagination into a language that artificial intelligence can understand, you need to master the language and be able to write effective sentences.
An Orthodox Jew reciting a prayer
Midjourney's usage areas
Midjourney V6 creates a creative resource for anyone interested in visual content production. Artists and designers can use Midjourney V6 to create visual works, create original designs or get inspiration for artistic projects. Marketers and advertisers can use product images for advertising campaigns, create graphics or visual content in social media campaigns. Storytellers and creative writers can use this tool to paint pictures with words for novels, short stories, and plays. Midjourney supports the use of visual imagery in storytelling or scenario telling. E-commerce merchants can create visuals to design products such as print-on-demand products, t-shirts, posters, and phone cases to be sold on e-commerce platforms. Midjourney can be used by teachers and students to prepare learning materials created with visual content or to support presentations. Midjourney offers a tool through which everyone can unleash their creativity.
Moses takes a historical selfie as he divides the Red Sea in two
Using Midjourney step-by-step
Type Midjourney into the Google search engine. Click midjourney.com. Sign up with the 'Sign-in' button. In order to use Midjourney, you must first register on Discord. All transactions are done through this discord. It offers 25-30 free photos to start with. Then you must become a paid member. Start creating your dream images with the /imagine command.
Midjourney seems really suitable for a wide range of users, from artists to designers to enthusiasts to creative individuals.
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