December 31, 2022

Midjourney

Now this is cool. I watched a couple of YouTube videos on Midjourney—I guess since I watched a few on ChatGTP—and started playing. Holy cow, is this addictive. I tried a number of prompts, sometimes using a reference photograph. Probably my favorite one used a hipster photo of Mailer from the mid-fifties; my prompts included “photograph, fifties, jazz club, city street.”

How cool is that? I know it doesn’t look exactly like Mailer, but damn it’s pretty darn close. It suggests Mailer as Hipster—an AI rendering of Mailer as white negro, perhaps. I tried another with a photo of myself, and prompted “retro future”:

Yes, there are some odd artifacts (why is the couch in the street? what’s up with the hands?) and the person only vaguely resembles me, but the feeling of the image is cool. I tried an anime style with one of my favorite photos of Autumn:

So cool. Midjourney seems to do “anime style” pretty well, though this render looks nothing like Autumn. This one does not either, but I love how the AI kept the feel of the original:

And this image is based off of this photo of Autumn raiding the refrigerator; I used “cross-processed 70s” as part of the prompt:

These were my successful images; many were not. I think I’m going to try to use this to generate photos for journal posts—especially if I don’t have my own original photos. I figure I’ll get better at prompting the AI as I gain experience. For now, I’m having a lot of fun. For now, here’s a rendering of Circe “casting a spell in the style of Waterhouse.”

Oh, what fun...