Ars-Technica
On Saturday, imagery service AI Midjourney began testing the alpha 4 (“v4”) version of its text-to-image summary model, which is available to subscribers on its Discord server. The new model provides more detail than was previously available on the service, inspiring some AI artists to remark that v4 makes it almost “too easy” to get high-quality results from simple prompts.
Midjourney opened to the public in March as part of a first wave of AI image synthesis models. It quickly gained a large following due to its distinct style and for being accessible to audiences before DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Before long, artwork designed by Midjourney was making headlines by winning art competitions, providing material for potentially historic copyright records, and appearing on stock illustration websites. stock (later banned).
Over time, Midjourney has refined its model with more training, new features and more details. The current default model, known as “v3”, debuted in August. Now, Midjourney v4 is being tested by thousands of members of the service’s Discord server who create images through the Midjourney bot. Users can currently try v4 by adding “–v 4” to their prompts.
“V4 is an entirely new code base and an entirely new AI architecture,” Midjourney founder David Holz wrote in a Discord announcement. “This is our first model trained on a new Midjourney AI supercluster and has been in the works for over 9 months.”
Ars-Technica
In our testing of Midjourney’s v4 model, we found that it provides a much greater amount of detail than v3, better understanding of prompts, better scene compositions, and sometimes better proportionality in its subjects. When searching for photorealistic images, some results we’ve seen may be difficult to distinguish from actual photos at lower resolutions.
According to Holz, other features of v4 include:
– Much more knowledge (of creatures, locations, etc.)
– Much better at getting small details (in all situations)
– Handles more complex prompts (with multiple levels of detail)
– Better with multi-object / multi-character scenes
– Supports advanced features like image prompt and multiple prompts
– Support –chaos arg (set it from 0-100) to control the variety of image grids
Reaction to Midjourney v4 has been positive on the service’s Discord, and fans of other CGI models – who regularly struggle with complex prompts to get good results – are taking note.
A Redditor named Jon Bristow posted in the r/StableDiffusion community: “Does anyone else feel that Midjourney v4 is ‘too easy’? it was pre-made.” In response, someone joked, “Sad for the Pro Teleprompters who are going to lose their new jobs created a month ago.”
Midjourney says v4 is still in alpha, so it will continue to fix quirks in the new model over time. The company plans to increase the resolution and quality of upscaled images from v4, add custom aspect ratios (like v3), increase image sharpness, and reduce text artifacts. Midjourney is available for a monthly subscription fee of between 10 and 50 USD per month.
Looking at the progress Midjourney has made in eight months of work, one wonders what next year’s advancements in image synthesis will bring.
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