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Overview
One exciting area where AI is making waves is image creation, allowing businesses and individuals alike to unlock their creative potential without any prior artistic skills. Today we breakdown Midjourney and AI image creation.
The Rise of AI-Generated Images:
AI-generated images have come a long way in recent years. What was once considered a complex and time-consuming task reserved for skilled artists can now be achieved effortlessly with the help of AI algorithms. The development of sophisticated machine learning models has made it possible for even the most inexperienced individuals to create stunning, high-quality images.
Introducing Midjourney:
Midjourney is an AI image generation tool that empowers users to unleash their creativity, regardless of their artistic expertise. Designed with simplicity in mind, Midjourney allows everyday people to effortlessly generate visually striking images without the need for complicated software or technical skills. By harnessing the power of AI, Midjourney provides a hassle-free solution to businesses and individuals seeking to create captivating visuals for their marketing campaigns, websites, or personal projects.
Getting Started with Midjourney:
To embark on your creative journey with Midjourney, all you need is access to the tool, which is available through a paid plan starting at just $10 per month. Midjourney operates via Discord, a popular communication platform, where users can connect with other like-minded individuals, participate in discussions, access tutorials, and stay updated with the latest announcements
The Benefits of AI-Generated Images:
AI-generated images offer several compelling advantages for businesses and individuals:
1. Time and Cost Savings:
Creating images from scratch or hiring professional designers can be time-consuming and expensive. With AI at your disposal, you can significantly reduce both the time and cost involved in image creation.
2. Unlimited Creativity:
AI algorithms have the ability to generate an endless variety of images, giving you a wide range of options to choose from and allowing you to explore creative ideas that were previously out of reach.
3. Consistency and Branding:
AI ensures a consistent visual style, making it easier to maintain a unified brand image across various platforms. This consistency helps businesses establish a strong presence and improve brand recognition.
Conclusion:
As AI technology continues to reshape sectors across industries, AI-generated images present a game-changing opportunity for businesses and individuals to unlock their creative potential. Midjourney, a user-friendly AI image generation tool, offers an accessible and affordable solution for creating stunning visuals without requiring any artistic skills. By embracing AI-generated images, businesses can foster creativity, enhance their brand presence, and stand out in an increasingly competitive marketplace. So, why not delve into the world of AI-generated images and unleash your imagination? The creative possibilities are boundless.
Topics Covered
- Introduction to Midjourney AI image generation tool
- Beginner-friendly guide to creating AI images
- No artistic skills required
- Information on Midjourney's availability and pricing
- Paid plan starting at $10 per month
- Midjourney's platform on Discord
- Accessing channels for announcements, discussions, and tutorials
- Upgraded version of Nvidia's Grace Hopper super chip
- Making AI models run three and a half times faster
- Introduction of OpenAI's Gptbot web crawler
- Crawling the entire internet for their chat GPT model
- Discussion of Google and Universal Music's AI-generated music talks
- Recap of Midjourney as a beginner-friendly guide
Podcast Transcript
Jordan Wilson [00:00:17]:
Can you create studio quality, beautiful art in seconds? You absolutely can with Midjourney. If you haven't heard of Journey yet, I hope that you're in for a treat today. So, my name is Jordan Wilson and welcome to Everyday AI. We are a daily livestream podcast, free daily newsletter, and a whole lot of other things. But to help everyday people like you and me get the most out of AI, because there's so many things happening, it can be extremely hard to keep up. You can spend hours a day and still be left behind. Or you can tune in to Everyday AI, our podcast on Spotify, Apple or our stream here. So, welcome. I hope you're excited to talk about Midjourney and to learn a little bit about Midjourney before we do, just as a reminder, please go to your Everydayai.com and sign up for that free day Late newsletter.
Daily AI news
So, before we start talking Midjourney and I'm extremely excited for this one, and I hope you all are too, let's talk about what's going on in the world of AI news. Because there is a lot, there is a lot today, maybe more than other days recently. So probably the thing grabbing the most headlines is Nvidia has announced a slew of new products and updates. There's going to be a lot more about this in the newsletter, but let's just talk high level here. So, they've announced an upgraded version of their Grace Hopper super chip, the GH 200. If that sounds super, dorky, just know this. The majority of generative AI that we all use, chat, GPT, Microsoft, Bing, Midjourney, all of these, they essentially all use Nvidia's chips, their GPU chips, to power their generative AI. So they announced some new updates to their superchip that should be coming out, I believe, in 2024. And they said that it is going to now run AI models three and a half times faster than the current model. So already, Nvidia is so far ahead of any other chipmaker in the world with their current chip. And their new chip that is going to be coming out is apparently 3.5 times faster. Wow. All right, next piece of news from OpenAI. So they didn't even really announce this. They kind of secretly released it, I guess. But a new web crawler has been, I guess, discovered, called Gptbot. So OpenAI didn't even announce this. They just added a support page and it got a lot of people talking. So what is this? Well, let's quickly talk about it. For OpenAI chat GPT, they need access to the entire internet. So this is the first time that they've kind of publicly showed how this is going to work or how it has been working behind the scenes. So they have this GBT bot and it essentially crawls the entire internet. So now a lot of there's kind of a showdown going on now because there's content creators and major publishing companies trying to block OpenAI and other kind of AI chats from crawling their website. Because this obviously the advent, I guess, of AI search is actually pretty bad for most websites because you're no longer getting those hits, you're no longer getting those users and the ad revenue. So there's kind of a lot of big companies now are scrambling to block as many of these AI chats as possible. All right. And is AI generated music coming soon to you? Well, probably google and Universal Music just announced that they are in talks on AI deepfakes. So yes, official AI generated music, could it be coming? Well, we'll find out. So make sure to check out more about that in the newsletter. And also if AI is going to lead to a financial crisis, so we'll have that and more. But that's not why you're here. You're not well, maybe you are here to listen to the AI news. If so, awesome. But let's talk about Midjourney. And if you're joining us live, I'm just going to go ahead and put this out. This is a beginner's guide, all right. And if you are listening on the podcast, this is one of those check in the show notes. We always link in the show notes to our website where you can watch the video replay of this. So if you aren't joining us live, this is one of those. It's going to be a little hard to describe everything, but I'm going to try my best. But for those of us joining live, go ahead, get your questions in now. Full disclosure, I am not a Midjourney expert, but I've been using it for months, generated plenty of images, use it multiple times a week. So hopefully we can get the basics answered and we can get some of that going. But also, go ahead, if you have created a Midjourney image, even if you're not a pro, go ahead and put it in the comments. We're actually going to feature our favorite one in the comments in our newsletter today. So go ahead, whether you're listening live on LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, wherever, go ahead and upload your favorite Midjourney image that you've created. All right, so without further ado actually, no, let's shout everyone out here. Juliet, thank you for joining us. She's saying super updates. Thank you. Yeah, a lot going on in the AI news space today. Let's see, who else do we have here? We have Trevor. Trevor saying my Midjourney game is all right. Well maybe, maybe it'll improve a little bit. That's I mean, that's why we're hopefully, hopefully we can get that to improve. Michael, just saying. Good morning, thank you for joining us. Brian, good morning. Thank you for joining us. Harvey Castro thank you for joining us. All right, let's get going. Let's talk Midjourney. Let's just jump straight into it.
How to access Midjourney
All right? So what is Midjourney? Well, simply put, it is AI image generation, right? You don't have to be a photographer, a graphic artist, an illustrator to be able to get kind of amazing images. So Midjourney is a paid plan. Okay. So when Midjourney first came out, there were free options. There's no longer free options. So we'll start there. So I have on the screen here kind of the differences between their different plans. Anywhere from the lowest monthly plan is $10 a month. The standard plan is probably the most popular. If that's the plan that we are on, that's $30 a month and all the way up to $120 a month. The biggest differences, I think, is the amount of time it takes and the limits or the caps, right? So you can go ahead and read that chart. And we'll obviously link it in the newsletter today as well. So once you log in, if you haven't used Discord, let's start there. I think a lot of people have used Discord, but actually go ahead and throw in the chat if have you used Discord? Have you not? I'm just curious. So Midjourney is run through discord. Don't worry, we're gonna go through what that means. So when you sign in to midjourney, after you sign up for an account, you're going to have something like this. And you can see I was playing around with actually some face swapping features yesterday. There's plugins for Midjourney as well that can do some amazing things. So you're going to see a page like this that essentially greets you. This isn't actually Discord, and this isn't how you use the app. So a lot of beginners kind of get stuck here. So in the bottom left hand corner, again, if you're not already using Discord, you will go in and click the little three dots at the bottom left hand corner and click go to Discord. All right? And that's how you officially launch Midjourney.
Breaking down Midjourney channels in Discord
So I'm going to go through because there's a lot of things in Midjourney. So there's essentially different channels here on the left hand side. All right, so this is an announcement from Midjourney, right? So this is the announcement channel. So if you've used slack or something, this should hopefully look pretty familiar. But if you haven't, don't worry. We're going to walk through the basics. So by default, this is where you're going to land when you log into midjourney. So here's how it works. And there's both good things and terrible things with how midjourney is set up. It is all, for the most part, public and open. So you'll see here there are these newbie rooms. Okay? So let me just give you some advice on this. If you want to learn Midjourney, this is how by default, you think that you have to learn it, right? But you don't have to, you don't have to be stuck with this newbie room because what's going to happen is if you try to generate an image, you'll see, even since I've logged in, there's been dozens or hundreds of new messages that come by, right?
Generating an image with Midjourney
So let's just go ahead and do something and actually I'm going to see if this can work. Why don't you just go ahead, just drop some ideas of something you might want to see of an image, right? So on here we see an example. It looks like there's an Elon Musk, an avatar of Elon Musk. There's a Black Owl in the forage old vintage. So we'll go over what this is. But if you want to see something, if you want to see me do something live, go ahead and drop it in the comments and we'll see if we can do this live. But if you are using the newbie channel, it can be a little difficult because especially if you're new to discord, it is hard to keep up. So as an example, I don't see any comments coming up just quick enough. Oh, thank you. Here we go. There's always a little bit of a delay. So Trevor says, Darth Vader eating cake. Fantastic. All right, we'll do this, Trevor. So I'm going to go ahead and do it in the main newbie channel. So here's Midjourney Literal 101. You do most of everything with prompts, quick prompts. So all you're going to do is in the messages down here, I'm going to click a backspace and then you'll see the most popular or frequently used ones pop up. So Imagine is kind of the prompt that you use to do almost any image creation in Midjourney. So you can do setting. We're going to talk about describe. There's a lot of other things, but if you just want to create AI art, which is what a lot of people are probably trying to learn, you just go to imagine. So I'm just going to go ahead and put what Trevor said in here. So I'm going to say, Darth Vader eating cake. So as we talk about this, I'm going to go over and you're going to see here live why it can be hard to learn Midjourney and to use it because of these newbie channels, right? So you'll see right here, it says waiting to start. And you'll see now and I'm going to try to zoom in on my screen and I'll kind of let you know what's happening. But you can see it kind of rendering in real time. And again, when we talked about the pricing plans, it also determines how fast it renders. So I'm on the Sander plan, so it goes pretty fast. So you'll see it slowly rendering and you'll see these four different options in a grid and you'll see it's now at 46%. Now it's at 62%. So it's slowly rendering these images. Okay, and we're almost done. And here's what can be tricky. You'll see, right away it jumped and I lost it. And I said, all right, where is my Darth Vader eating cake? That's because I'm in a newbie channel and it gets pushed, and sometimes it's extremely hard to find where it is. There's other ways that you can go back and click, but you sometimes just kind of have to scroll through and find it. Okay, so I found our picture right there of Darth Vader eating cake. All right, so let me go over some basics of Midjourney. This is basic. So that's what we're talking about today. We're not going to get into advanced topics like, you know, like chaos commands, weird commands. We're not going to get into that today at least, right? But here's the basics right? Here's the absolute basics of Midjourney. So we are in our newbie channel. We typed in Imagine, and then we said Darth Vader eating cake. And you'll see, now there's four images that have fully rendered. And I have some options. It says u one u two u three u four and V one V two v three v four. So essentially think of it as clockwise. So upper left hand corner is one. Upper right hand corner is two. Lower right hand corner is three. Lower left hand corner is four. So if I want to, U means upscale, V means variation. Or I can click there's kind of a recycle arrow type thing. So if I want to redo it, I can click that. All right, so let's just as an example, let's say that we really like number four here. So if I want to save that image again, we're going over the basics here. You're not going to save it like this. It's going to be too small. So I'm going to click u. Four. And what that means, it's going to upscale just that one, just that lower right hand corner. So version four. So again, now I have to kind of scroll down and find it, which is a little hard. I know there's a different way to do this, but this is how most people I'm showing you how most people if you've never used Midjourney, this is how you're going to be using it. All right, so now I have Darth Vader eating cake. Here's our upscaled version right here. All right, also important to talk about now there's different kind of versions of Midjourney, right? So right now it's on 5.2, which is amazing. I think the 5.2 update was probably one of the biggest and best updates since Midjourney was released. And there should be the 5.3 update coming out here in a couple of weeks. They only update every couple of months. So pretty big updates. So 5.2 introduced some new easy options that you can do after we upscaled. So we can do this that says very strong, very subtle, zoom out two x zoom out 1.5 or custom zoom. So this is really cool. And you've probably seen some animations on Twitter where essentially people you can start with a very close up image and then keep doing zoom out to over and over and over. And then people will use something called runway to do a technique. I'm probably going to get this wrong. I think it's called interpolation, where essentially you can keep zooming out and it'll almost create like a movie with these Midjourney images. So just to show you how this works, I'm going to click zoom out, too, right? So this is basics. We're going over the basics here, y'all. So now I'm going to scroll down again. The newbie channel, it can be hard to use. It can be hard to find where your images are after you upscale them. So I'm even having trouble there's another way. You can go back to your Midjourney page and launch from there. But I'm going to go ahead and let's just skip to before we get out of the newbie channel, I'm going to show you two things. All right, I think our upscale zoom out is done here. Let's see. Here we go. We found it. So here's our zoom out version. Right, now you can see more things that weren't there. So before we had kind of a close up of Darth Vader eating cake. And you'll see it just got jumped off my screen. But now there's other things on the screen. There was apples, there were candles. So very cool.
Using a private channel in Midjourney
All right, now, before we jump out of the newbie channel, just two things to note. You can probably already see, if you're watching, how it can be frustrating because there's so many new messages and this is by default, right? But the great thing is it's a great way to learn because you can go through and scroll and see other people, what they're creating, right? So this is a very cool picture of looks like a sunset or a sunrise over the ocean. So I can go in, I can copy and paste this prompt, and I can make some tweaks to it, and then I can try it for my own. So it's a great way to learn the newbie channels, but it can be extremely frustrating. So what you'll want to do, and I'll actually do an AI and five on this today, which you can just create your own dedicated channel and essentially invite the bot. It sounds technical, but it's not. But essentially, all you're going to do then is you are going to have your own dedicated channel. And there we go. So I was messing around with some face swapping things and some blending techniques last night. So let's go ahead and run that same prompt here and then we're going to go through some other advanced topics. So actually, let me jump back in. I saw another suggestion. All right, jay Israel said Darth Vader eating a cake on a pegasus. So let's do that. So let's do Darth Vader eating cake on a pegasus. All right, so again, prompt. And we're going to go Darth Vader eating cake on a pegasus. Hopefully, I spelled Pegasus correctly. There. All right, so when you are in a private channel, it's not terribly hard to set up. And a lot of newbies don't know this, but now you can see it's so easy to go ahead and just only see your images. So if you are new at Midjourney and you've been going into these newbie channels and you're a little lost, huge hack. Create a private channel, invite the Midjourney bot. It's very simple to do. And I'll have a video today showing you how to do that. And now it's very easy to work with Midjourney. All right, so now we have Darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. All right, so we're almost done. Now we have some great colors, very otherworldly. I like this. This is a great suggestion. All right, so let's go ahead and use the variation because we haven't done that yet. So let's say I like this one, the fourth one, the bottom right hand corner. It looks like Darth Vader may be using chopsticks to eat the cake. So let's just go ahead and click V four. So what that's going to do is we're going to get four variations of this one in the lower right hand corner, right? So again, the U is to upscale. This kind of swap button here is to redo the generation. And then the V's are to just do variations of whichever one that you like the most. All right, so now we're getting variations of this one in the lower right hand corner. That was Darth Vader eating cake on a pegasus. All right, we're almost done here. And then I'm going to show you pretty simple but how to save all of these. All right, so we are done. All right, so I'm going to go ahead now and click let's save this third one here in the lower left hand side. So we're going to click U three to upscale that because again, if you save it straight from here, straight from this grid with a four, it's going to be pretty low quality. All right? So if you want to save it, the best way to do it is after you click upscale, you don't just right click it from there you're going to click Web. Okay? And then I'm going to click Visit site. All right. And now we just have just that one and then we can right click it and save the image. All right, cool. So that is the basics of Midjourney.
Answering audience questions
I'm going to try to show you all one or two kind of advanced things, but I want to jump in the comments and make sure I get to some questions here. So Val said, good morning, thank you for joining us. Haley, what's up? Haley says she's tried, but she hasn't get it. So shout out Balani customs. Let me just see. Let me make sure that if we have any questions here, all right, brian is asking, is this being recorded? Will there be a link? Yes. So you can always every single day in our newsletter. So make sure you go sign up at there's always we send links to the YouTube recording. You can listen on the podcast, but yeah, even on LinkedIn you can go back and there will be recordings. Fabian saying yes, I love Star Wars. Dr Rasafa gadas saying here for the AI hot tea. Absolutely. Ryan wants this as his profile picture, asking if we can send it to him. Okay, here's a question from Cecilia. Cecilia, thanks for joining us. So Cecilia saying my only concern is how do we know which images are real and how many are manipulated imaging? So. Yeah, I'm not sure. So in Midjourney, obviously nothing is technically real, everything's manipulated or AI. So if we're talking as a consumer on the back end right now, there is no good way. A lot of different companies so Google has said that they're going to try to institute an AI watermark, different social media companies such as Instagram, I know Instagram has been testing this, that if anything was created or edited with AI that they would denote that. So right now there is no actual way, Cecilia, to know what has been generated in Midjourney or Dolly from OpenAI stable diffusion. There is no way.
Creating hyperrealistic photos in Midjourney
I didn't even talk about this, but I been a photographer for a very long time. I've taken probably in more than 500,000 photos. I have a bunch of DSLRs. And even for me, if you are trying to create photos, right, this is more of a fantasy fiction, darth Vader eating cake on a Pegasus. But let's go ahead and try something else because this is a great thing. So I'm going to do something very broad and because with the 5.2 update, it's made it actually so much easier for beginners to go in and to create great images without much prompting. Okay, so let's just do as an example, let's just say street style photography of young man. I'm going to say man in his mid thirty s. And I'm going to use a word. So in Midjourney, people talk about kind of like power words, but essentially there's words I'm just going to go ahead and say unsplash. So I typed in imagine. And then I just said street style photography of man in his mid 30s, unsplash. So we're obviously going to get a lot of crazy variants, right? But let's talk real quick about power words and kind of to Cecilia's point with real imagery. So I typed in the word unsplash. So if you're not sure what unsplash is. It is a stock image photo. And we've done some testing, but there's great people who write and talk about Midjourney. So using words, power words like photorealistic, cinematic, unsplash product, photo, stock photography, you used to really have to use a lot of different words in your prompt to be able to get high quality images. But with the 5.2 update, not so much anymore. So you'll see, little prompt that I put in here is not very good. It just said a man in his mid 30s street style unsplash. Right? But if we look let's go ahead and upscale these, these look kind of real, right? I'm going to upscale this one in the upper left hand corner to Cecilia's point, if you didn't know any better. Right. Let's go ahead and zoom in on this. So, to the untrained eye, this looks like it could be real. It's a man. It looks like maybe he's in Europe. He's got a trench coat, he's got glasses, his hair. Right? All from a prompt that I made up on the fly. Took 10 seconds. It looks extremely high quality. Right. So, Cecilia, there is no exact way to tell if something is real or not a giveaway. Usually right now, AI generators, AI. Image generators are not good with extremities. They're not good with hands. They're not good with feet. So even in this photo, you can't see it because this man in his 30s has his hands tucked in his pocket. But that's usually a dead giveaway. But other than that, especially people who are using Midjourney a lot, it can be pretty hard. Like I said, I've taken more than 500,000 photos. I've gotten them published all over the place. And with the new 5.2 update, and if you are getting into some of these more advanced techniques, we didn't talk about seeds and styles and parameters, because this is meant to be kind of an entry introduction to Midjourney. When you start to use those, it gets even harder. All right, let's talk. We don't have time. We went super late on this. I wanted to get to some new advanced techniques. But actually, if you want more on this, let me know. Drop me a comment and say, hey, let's do another Midjourney episode, and let's talk about blank. So go ahead and let me know. Also, in the Show Notes today and in the comments, I've linked a couple other recent episodes that we've done with David and with Rory. So we've already done a couple Midjourney episodes. So if this piqued your interest and you want to know more, make sure you check in the Show Notes or in the comments here. If you're joining us live, we have links to those other episodes. They're great. There's plenty of great creators. But we were lucky enough to have Rory and David on our show, and they kind of shared us some of their tips, tricks and techniques. So I hope this was insightful, right? Yeah. Juliet says this photo here looks like he's in Prague. Great session, Jordan. Thank you. So, as a reminder, go ahead, run off to Midjourney. If you have an account, go in there or any AI image, come back here, load up your favorite. We're going to feature our favorite AI image that you all have shared, that our community has shared. We're going to go ahead and feature our favorite in the newsletter today, so make sure to go upload it. Let me know what you can create. I hope this was helpful. Let me know. Drop a question, leave us a comment, and I hope to see you all back again tomorrow and every day on Everyday AI. Thanks, bye.