How to use Midjourney to Make Psychedelic Art
Midjourney AI is one of the most famous machine-learning art generation tools. It's also, in my opinion, one of the most fun.
In this post, I'll explain how to access the Midjourney Beta, the basics of how to use the bot, and some possible prompts. I'll also shamelessly show off the art it generated from my suggestions.
What is Midjourney, and Why Does it Matter?
Midjourney is an AI-driven tool that can create images based on textual inputs.
Going out on a philosophical limb, AI like Midjourney matter because of what it might be able to tell us about ourselves. When we give it a prompt, it generates images based on the datasets of millions of examples that match the words we’ve used. So perhaps, if trained on thorough enough datasets, it could be a window into our collective subconscious.
Less metaphysically, tools like Midjourney are noteworthy because of how they can potentially be misused. Will they impact the livelihoods of human artists? When we train AI on biased or incomplete data, we know that the results inherit or amplify these prejudices. Being mindful of these dangers is essential too.
So not only is Mindjourney fun, it's part of more significant developments that are worth keeping an eye on.
How to use Midjourney
To sign up for Midjourney, go to https://www.midjourney.com/ and hit the "join the Beta" button. Simples!
Unlike previous machine-learning art tools such as Dreamscope and Wombo, Midjourney does not operate via a web interface. Instead, you are invited to a discord server and interact with the AI via a particular Discord bot. So you will need a Discord account.
Once you've accepted the invite, using the bot is really (really) simple. Go into the appropriate channel. Type: "/imagine" to open the input prompt. Then just add your suggested keywords. If you're on the unpaid trial option, as I was, it will be one of the "newbie" chats.
Your first response from the bot will give you a composite of four images like this one from the prompt: “psychedelic owl on a mushroom.”
You can choose to either create more variations or upscale one of the four images. I liked the image in the bottom left, as that was what I had in mind, so I elected to get more variations of that one.
Of those four, I was most drawn to number two (top right), so I got that one upscaled, and this was the final result:
I was pretty happy with this. But not all prompts lead to images that really capture our imagination. For example, "animal spirits dancing in an infinite field of Sand Pedro cactus" didn't quite work for me:
I can't entirely blame the AI, though. I mean, I should have known that "Psilocybe subaeruginosa in clean, crisp hyperspace, cooking breakfast" was not the best prompt:
It's essential to be open-minded, though. I didn't get what I expected for "elven city in hyperspace, hyper-detailed, 3D, in the style of Roger Dean" (not least because it autocorrected to "eleven," lol.) But I like it nonetheless.
Everything so far has been brightly colored due to my psychedelic-themed prompts. But Midjourney does some of its best work when things get dark. Here, I think the bot got a bit existential with the instructions: "life after death, Midjourney style."
Keep in mind that this is a distillation of the data Midjourney was trained on, which almost certainly isn't an accurate reflection of collective beliefs about an afterlife. But it's still pretty cool and arguably counts as psychedelic art.
But, for unashamed eye-watering fun, I still like the final result of "undiscovered psychedelic molecules."
5 Tips and Reminders for using Midjourney
Remember, if you are on the free trial, you only get 25 uses of Midjourney. Every time you create variations or upscale images, this counts towards the total. So those free uses can run out pretty quick. Use them wisely and/or be prepared to get a paid subscription.
Be as vague or details as you like in our prompts.
Don't use obscene, racist, or hateful language in your prompts.
Images created by Midjourney using your prompts are not our exclusive intellectual property. You can use them per the user agreement here. You can only get exclusive use of them if you shell out for a corporate subscription package.
As always, observe good discord etiquette.
Is it psychedelic art, though?
As fun as Midjourney is, I don't feel it can compete with existing art. It simply can't tap into our collective beliefs in the same way that human artists can. And where it approaches this, it's only with our intervention. It's art, but it's not genuinely great art.
Is it psychedelic? When he suggested the term to Aldous Huxley, Humphrey Osmond intended psychedelic to mean "mind manifesting." How Midjourney fits into this might be complicated. I'm not convinced it has a mind to manifest - not in any way we'd understand it. Is it manifesting something about our minds, either individual or collective? That depends not only on the images in the data used to train Midjourney but the nature of the connections between external representations and our inner subjective lives. As a philosopher, I'm not sure there is a clear answer to that, so I'd call this ambiguous.
But all of that's OK. Midjourney is fun and thought-provoking, and there is nothing wrong with that.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't keep an eye on the real-world impacts and implications of tools like this. Do they take work away from people? Is the data they're trained on reinforcing prejudice and therefore creating indirect harm? While we see the exercise as a fun creation of images, are we simply being used to train AI to better carry out some other purpose? (That last one isn't as crazy as it sounds. When you complete captcha or Recaptcha challenges, you're helping train AIs to identify visual inputs such as words and images.)
So tools like his can be fun, but it's always worth considering what using them means.
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