Midjourney v6 is now out in the wilds of public visual creation and this newest upgrade to the famous AI platform is better than ever.
With MJ v6, users can look forward to better realism than ever before, better prompt specificity and importantly, text that looks convincing. This last quality of v6 is something that many AI rendering models have long had problems with and still often do.
The new Midjourney model can be accessed through Discord by the public and has finally left a beta testing mode to be classified as being in “Alpha”.
It really is notably better than its predecessors in many ways and particularly on realism overall. However, perhaps understandably given its better rendering of realistic details, v6 is slower than its predecessors according to reporting from Petapixel and others.
The Reddit r/singularity subreddit has had users creating a list of changes that they’ve noted in v6 of Midjourney.
These include the ability to create longer, more specific prompts, specify colors you want and to specify a whole range of other details for rendering an image.
Users have also noted the already-mentioned ability to add natural-looking text in images, and how MJ v6 seems to understand natural language composition in human prompts better than ever before.
According to other reporting from the site Tom’s Guide, Midjourney v6 basically acts more like a visual-rendering version of ChatGPT’s newer versions and lets you have a conversation with it in your efforts to create images.
Overall, the verdict is that Midjourney v6 is notably better than its most recent predecessor v5.2 and is especially great at creating realistic images of limbs and human beings in general.
Now, there are plenty of very valid worries and criticisms that photographers and visual artists of all kinds can have about all of the above abilities with this technology. However, in terms of simple ability, v6’s qualities are worth noting.
Curiously, in an age of photography that increasingly gets retouched and edited to look almost dreamlike in its vibrancy and other details, tools like Midjourney could prompt photographic style adjustments.
It’s not hard to imagine some photographers and photo enthusiasts going back to working with grittier photo techniques and results for the sake of distinguishing their work from the saturation of AI-rendered “photos” that have already flooded social media and advertising.
The bottom line for Midjourney v6 is that it genuinely delivers impressive improvements over not only its predecessor but also most other visual rendering AI platforms available today.
Its ability to generate realistic faces is one thing, but its capacity for generating realistic if slightly imperfect images of real people and text is not only especially cool to see but also possibly problematic.
As AI increasingly gets used for deepfakes, technical abilities like the above can easily be misused too. Midjourney’s creators have made efforts to block the use of their platform for these ends, but they aren’t guaranteed to work.
For photographers, Midjourney could also pose a professional problem, especially in the commercial photography space and that’s also something to consider.
On the other hand, these technologies are now inevitable, and the profession will have to evolve one way or another.
Image credit: Midjourney
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