As a clanker-apologist I gotta say this is the strawman of AI slop brought to life. Letting the machine do literally everything without even supervision and see how it turns out? No surprise at all the results are so bad.
My fav AI video is still Post-Scarcity Blues from a year ago https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_t3h2AZ0KY There have been others I've enjoyed since then. But, that one stands out in memory. Work warning: it is occasionally just a bit spicy.
I know the founder through a lot of light discussion. If lots of for-profit alternatives become serious competition, he'd rather move on to something else than take on VC money. His POV is that he already has more money than he ever wanted. All he wants now is to do fun research.
Midjourney is not actually an AI imagery company. It's a research lab that happened to do AI images first.
The founder is a hardware guy who made enough money to retire young off of the sale of his company, Leap Motion. But, he decided what he really wanted to do was cool research with cool people. So, he started Midjourney. The goal for the AI image generator was to be cool research, pay for itself, and grow the lab. It ended up making far more money than ever expected.
I was a Discord mod for Midjourney when it was still in private beta. I got to participate in some of the discussions of "WTH are we doing and how should we do it?" DavidH is very much a smart hippie idealist. He isn't really motivated by even more money beyond how it enables more fun research. MJ actively refused investment. And, actively refused partnerships that would make them money but wouldn't help build the community or the lab.
So, put together: I can totally see how this looks weird from the outside. But, having spent a few years peeking inside, I'm only surprised it took so long for them to branch out like this.
Not on the VC path. Not even on the max-profit path. Just on the "Have fun doing cool research" path.
I was a mod on MJ for its first few years and got to know MJ's founder through discussions there. He already had "enough" money for himself from his prior sale of Leap Motion to do whatever he wanted. And, he decided what he wanted was to do cool research with fun people. So, he started MJ. Now he has far more money than before and what he wants to do with it is to have more fun doing more cool research.
Having spent a lot of time talking to engineers working on AI tools, I find the idea that AI is intended to replace creativity comes entirely from internet comment sections and not from the engineers working on AI.
SD has a very primitive conceptual model. Basically “bag of words nudging pixels around for a while”. Words near each other influence each other. But, there’s nearly no understanding of grammar.
Midjourney is similar with text prompts. But, with image prompts it is able to understand content separately from style. You can give it a photo of two people and it can return many images of recognizable approximations of those people in different poses.
SD can only start from pixels, blur and deblur those pixels in place.
MJ image prompts probably works via image-to-tokens added on to your text-to-tokens-to-image.
Right now there is a ton of stigma around AI art. That stigma fuels a ton of poorly-informed rhetoric against it. There is also tons and tons of casual use of AI art being shitposted for funsies everywhere that reinforces that rhetoric that AI art means "Push button. Receive crap. Repeat."
Meanwhile, as someone who has been engaged with the AI art community for years, and spent years volunteering part-time as a content moderator for Midjourney, the process of creating art via AI with intentionality is deeply human.
As an MJ mod, I have seeeeeeen things.... It's like browsing though people's psyche. Even in public portfolios people bare their souls because they assume no one will bother to look. People use AI to process the world, their lives, their desires, their trauma. So much of it is straight-up self-directed art therapy. Pages and pages, thousands of images stretching over weeks, sometimes months, of digging into the depths of their selves.
Now go through that process to make something you intend to speak publicly from the depth of your own soul. You don't see much of that day to day because it is difficult. It's risky at a deeply personal level to expose yourself like that.
But, be honest: How much deeply personal art do you see day to day? You see tons of ads and memes. But, to find "real art" you have to explicitly dig for it. Shitposting AI images is as fun and easy as shitposting images from meme generators. So, no surprise you see floods of shitposts everywhere. But, when was the last time you explicitly searched out meaningful AI art?
Well, yeah. If you explicitly try to come up with a cute, gimmicky idea, it's not going to be serious. Taste still matters regardless of paint, cameras or computers.
There's already conversation in AI art about how "Y'all will miss all these weird AI glitches when they're gone!" It will become the new tape hiss. Something people will nostalgically simulate in later media that doesn't have it naturally.