MidJourney for Writers and Readers

While I was on holiday this summer, I saw many of my photography friends playing with a new software called MidJourney -- an AI controlled programme that creates art, based on user instructions. My friends were posting amazing AI-created art and I started to salivate.

Their work was A-MAZ-ING.

When I got back from holiday, one of the first things I did was hide from my children with my laptop and start playing. At the time, I was reading The Gormenghast Trilogy, as it was one of Joanne Harris’s picks. The description is so vivid in the book that my imagination felt fired up from it, so I married the two together and started tinkering around.

My initial attempts were not great. At first I tried to recreate some scenes from the book, but quickly found out that giving the AI too many instructions wasn’t creating what I imagined. Instead, I decided to try some character studies. The results were so fun. Not necessarily the same as what I had in my head, but still cool. Here are some of them.

Applications for writers & readers

Immediately I could see so many uses for writers: creating cover artwork for books, making character studies, storyboarding. Just scrolling through other people’s work tonight, I found one user using the AI to make images which she turned into a comic book in Photoshop (by user Kris Kashtanova). Another user manifested images to illustrate his Sci-Fi story (by user OM3N1R).

For readers, it’s fun to just play around and make different variations of your favourite characters. Go on. You know you want to.

OM3N1R_suburban_area_of_an_alien_city_elevated_view_skyscrapers_735a60d0-f587-4a6d-90db-8ecadf138926.png

OM3N1R_symmetrical_architectural_drawing_of_an_alien_government_cd6869e8-675c-4acd-a6c9-1cc567cbdb07.png

But how?!

I can already hear most of you saying, ‘Well, I don’t know how to use Photoshop. I’m not visual. I can’t do this.’ But that’s the beauty of it: yes, you can. This is the perfect programme for people who don’t feel they have any artistic talent. And I’m going to show you how.

I’ve waded through a lot of videos and experimented for hours (my husband will confirm), so that I can help cut down on your learning curve. Warning: this gets very addictive, very fast. You’ve been warned.

AI portrait of Emma Bovary

PROMPT: Emma Bovary :: portrait :: line drawing :: romantic :: pastels --ar 4:5

How to get started

First step, go to https://discord.gg/midjourney and sign up.

When you first open it up, it looks scary and intimidating. After all, this was created for function, not beauty, by coders in a lab, so don’t expect it to be like Word. If you have trouble with Scrivener, well…good luck. Let me see if I can help you.

You need to sign up for a trial membership to get access. It gives you 25 free goes. May I suggest that you skip this stage and just go straight for the $10 basic package? The reason is that, if you are on a trial basis, you can only create within the #newbie threads and whatever you create gets lost among the constant waterfall of other users’ pictures. You will spend valuable time searching through the thread for your creation. The $10 membership gives you 200 images. Also, in the trial membership, you can’t use any of the images commercially (should this be something you wanted to do).

I’m going to continue this article assuming you’ve followed my advice and subscribed for $10. Go here to learn how to subscribe.

This gives you your own Direct Channel to the MidJourney Bot (let’s define the MidJourney Bot as your personal imagination servant). It looks a bit like a space invader on a purple background and will be at the top of your tool bar on the left. Click on the space invader to get your bot up (again, this is subscribers only. If you didn’t subscribe, click on the boat on the left and then click on a #newbies thread. More info here).

At the bottom of the screen, you’ll see a area where you can write:

Learning to speak its language

One thing I learned quickly is that MidJourney cannot handle complex instructions. KISS principle is definitely best (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

There are a number of ways to speak to it.

The best way to start is to write short, descriptive words or phrases, separated by commas like:

At the end of the phrase, you will want to let it know what sizes you want your creation to be, so you give it an “aspect” command, where the first number is width and the second is height:

--ar 1:1 (square)

--ar 16:9 (landscape)

--ar 4:5 (portrait)

Refer to the MidJourney help pages for more information and other commands you might want to try.

**What’s happening here?**

When you type in a command, the MidJourney Bot will give you four options.
Underneath, you will see two rows: The U Row stands for “Upscale” and the V Row stands for “Variations”. The numbers correspond to the image: Top left is 1, top right is 2, Bottom Left is 3, Bottom Right if 4.
If you want to create a high-resolution version of one of the images, then hit the corresponding button in the U Row.
If you want to see further variations of one of the images, then hit the corresponding button in the V Row.
The arrows just mean: I think you could do better. Try again.

Other cool things

You can also give MidJourney a “root” image that you want it to use for your creation. For example, maybe you want your character to look like Ryan Reynolds or Zendaya (she seems to be very popular on here). Find a URL for a picture of that root image and copy-and-paste it at the beginning of your phrase, like:

https://s.mj.run/DNqqwO5SC3Q pen and ink, watercolor black and white, imposing castle, moody clouds, sprawling village , dark forest --q 2 --ar 16:9

In this one I was trying to create an image of Gormenghast. Hearing that Mervyn Peake based it on Arundel Castle, I found a picture of the castle and entered that as my root image and this is what I ended up with.

You can also tell it do create something in the style of a famous artist or in an artistic style. Or you can enter the name of a fake or real person. Below are my “Punk” Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables and pop-art circa 1982 Dolly Parton. I’ve put a few references for this in the further resources section at the bottom.

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Can I use these commercially?

If you have a paid for account (as opposed to a trial), the short answer is yes; however, the law hasn’t really caught up with AI artwork because it is so new. While you may own the copyright, you do not have exclusive use. Basically, anybody else could use your artwork, too. Even if you are using a paid-for personal bot, others can see what you are doing. You can get it straight from the horse’s mouth here.

For example, if you wanted to use it on your book cover, you can’t be sure that somebody else won’t be using it, too. You could hours of fun making images and then taking them into Canva to create your cover image.

But there is also a handy trick for deleting your work from the server, in case you do want to keep it private. You can learn how to do it in this video.

Edit: Amazon has recently been making authors declare whether there is AI-created artwork or content in books uploaded. The right thing to do is be honest about it, or risk having your account closed.

Is this ethical? What about real illustrators and artists?

I’ve thought about this a lot and, in its current form, I don’t think this will take traditional work away from artists, illustrators, and photographers (although I’m sure others disagree). In fact, used correctly, I think these same groups will get a lot out of playing with the creations from the AI bot and ameliorating them in other software/using them within their work to create new art.

The AI bot is far from perfect and does not deliver exactly what is in your head. And no matter how hard it tries, it will NEVER be as creative as a human. If you look closely at the images, the drawings are fuzzy representations of what you asked for. It’s giving the idea of your request, not necessarily your request. At present, you cannot really tweak with it delivers, aside from asking for variations.

For me, I am using it as a visualisation tool, playing around with character studies, and just making some of the ideas in my head come to life. “Hey! I wonder what Boris Johnson riding a giant chicken into the sunset might look like.”