Midjourney — The AI Art Generator

Aug 11

Prompt words: fabric floating underwater, teal, moody

I will be honest that the most thought I’ve put into AI in the last decade has been mostly around the possibility of humanoid looking robots gaining sentience, rising up and taking over. The fact that AI already lives among us in weird and curious ways didn’t really occur to me until I started fucking around with Midjourney — an AI art generation program. Admittedly, my first response to this program existing was a negative one as I saw every living artist essentially die a slow, and tragic death. But, the more time I spent on it not as an attempt to generate art for resale or use, but rather, as an exploration into our cultural consciousness the cooler it got.

If you don’t know how it works, you give the program prompt words or phrases and it generates art around what you’ve suggested. The more specific you get, the more specific and curated the art gets. What it’s basically doing is trawling our entire artistic history, and generating something reflective of all that, within seconds. It’s a really cool concept because it wouldn’t exist without actual artists. Humans created the database that the program scans. The cooler part is that it seemingly may provide endless opportunities to discover how our cultural consciousness perceives things, conceptually and not. And of course, how we think about things.

So I decided to do an experiment where I offered it the same prompt, but in a variety of “styles” that exist in the art world. So I generated a black and white sketch of hands in several different styles.