Midjouney is an image generating AI model that can create images from text discriptions, similar to Dall-E and Stable Diffusion.

Midjourney branched off from the “Disco-Diffusion” build sometime in 2022, and entered open beta on the 12th of July 2022. I was lucky enough to join the open beta in its first month and experimented with the proprietory AI model.

Initial Impressions:
While the exact constituency of the Midjourney model is a closely garded secret, it’s behaviour, as well as the text arguments used to alter its output, are notably similar to those of Disco Diffusion, and as Disco Diffusion is an open source project, it semm likely that the Midjourney code is largely based on that of Disco Diffusion.

Stylistic/Behavioural Differences:
The style of Midjouney has always been rather distinctive, painterly images with fine detail, low-key lighting, and an eagerness to fade-off into the distance.
That’s not to say that Midjouney can only do one style, but rather, that the dataset used for training the Midjourney model (assumedly) contains a majority of paintings with a bias towards low-key lighting with strong use of chiaroscuro.

Technical limitations:

Initial renders are 256x256, upscales go to 2048x2048. Upscales, howeve, are not true upscales, in that the Midjourney AI re-runs the prompt (likely using the initial image as a starting “seed”), at a higher resolution. How the model is able to convert images from (an assumed) latent space, 512x512 in size, to resolutions 4x greater is something of a mystery and a trade secret. While the upscales will differ from the initial image, Midjourney is able to perform this kind of upscaling natably better than its contemporaries, such as Stable Diffusion.

Copyright & Legal:

Rights You give to Midjourney:

By using the Services, You grant to Midjourney, its successors, and assigns a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sublicensable no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute text, and image prompts You input into the Services, or Assets produced by the service at Your direction. This license survives termination of this Agreement by any party, for any reason.

Your rights:
Subject to the above license, You own all Assets You create with the Services, provided they were created in accordance with this Agreement. This excludes upscaling the images of others, which images remain owned by the original Asset creators. Midjourney makes no representations or warranties with respect to the current law that might apply to You. Please consult Your own lawyer if You want more information about the state of current law in Your jurisdiction.

Please note: Midjourney is an open community which allows others to use and remix Your images and prompts whenever they are posted in a public setting. By default, Your images are publically viewable and remixable. As described above, You grant Midjourney a license to allow this.

Use Cases: