or rather i should say, what " I " can do with MJ. but possible to learn

It is truely amazing. I've just played around with it one time... it's easy to get stuck

But... there is someting with it. A feeling that something is lacking. Perhaps it's a bit like when all new art- (and other) technologies arrive. Many might think that it is the human touch that is missing (or nature, 'lifefore' etc), that it is somehow 'to easy'. This is also my feeling. But I think this too shall pass.

Thank you for sharing. I'm also curious of your intentions, or if it's more exploration of generated worlds?

I had that feeling a bit at first, or that it's just easy town. I'll say as the AI improves it's likely going to get easier... but it depends on what you're going for. This is going to be one of those tools that's going to have a bar for creating moderately competent imagery which is not going to be too high. But to get truly astounding imagery with consistency, will take a sufficient level of "mastery". It will be like its own cut rate programming language in a sense as the AI becomes more comprehensive and capable.

But it also learns from all the input that goes into it. At a certain points will it become like deviantart, where tons of kids will be using it and feeding it trash over and over? I'm not sure. Developers maybe be able to put a lid on that, or offer more tailored services I would hope.


As far as the images I shared... obviously what I was going for here was fidelity of the image quality, at a certain standard that I felt shows the realism that is capable. I've spent, at least, into the hundreds of hours cultivating that skill over the last 4 months to be able to produce images of a certain resolution quality but also what I would consider an artistic style that is consistent with stuff I would fawn over if I saw someone else creating it.

But it can essentially pull off anything, even so-called "feeling" lacking in the imagery of any tangible 2D art medium (painting, drawing, photography, etc -- it's about recreating technique and theme). Obviously the one thing it cannot do is 3D, physical art mediums... for now. Until the marriage of AI and 3D printing becomes sufficiently accessible and capable.

Here's some random other stuff I've done

Okay, but this statement implies that you've actually done something, made something, created something. I would say your initial statement "what Midjourney can do" is a lot more honest and accurate, because honestly, what did you do...?

These are spoon fed pastiches of hundreds of thousands of other artists' efforts, none of whom have consented to have their work stolen and mashed up for your benefit. Art itself is devalued because of it. Culture is debased and diminished. Artists galore will lose their livelihoods. It's none of it remotely a good thing.

Not trying to single you out, by the way. I've just completely hit the wall with this stuff, and I've run out of patience for those who selectively turn a blind eye to its obvious ethical issues.

Give this a watch:

some of them i would concede (the multi-frame pastiches with 2 or 3 images, yes... using artist style modifiers. they didn't just pop out of me taking minutes to do. i've been learning this craft for 4 months putting multiple hours in every day, like a scuffed programmer.


i'm 42 years old. my uncle could draw near photorealistic graphite drawings, and from my the ages 8-12 i had engaged in my own pencil sketches and color charcoal "arts" which showed a similar, albeit sophmoric, knack for subject matter (kinda weird too our life paths turned out very similar). in the mid-late 90s i used to run a bulletin board system on renegade software creating what's called "pixel" art (back then we called it ansi, using ansi.sys and thedraw.exe). I joined a local (are code) digital art group that hope to emulate ACiD and iCE, and then for the first time, and the only month I was with them, this pack was largely downloaded and shared across the scene, and now resides on archive sites like http://artscene.textfiles.com/ thanks in part to my ansis--and is the only one ever found to date. throughout the early 2000s I went to art school and graphic design school, got my degree, worked in the industry, and then spent several years also taking amateur photography and creating digital art, freelance work.

so I don't know why you think you feel the need to single me out with the word STOLEN because YOU hit a wall.


these new right here... are mine though. i worked in all time said, like 10-20 hours to get THESE Specific images. through countless re-renders, putting them in PAINT.NET image editing software working layers and many elements, adding renders, manipulating and working with the AI in tandem. you haven no clue wtf you're on about using the word STOLEN. i shared at least like what 40+ images that I created all from scratch here in the past 12-16 months from my own stock photography and image editing software. I saw midjourney and took advantage of it, sad when ppl can't see the outsourcing of dexterity when health problems and life setbacks are quite often the qualifiers that lead to working SMARTER.

but sure pal, enjoy these "stolen" arts.

Well, umm...



I think he's asking some legitimate questions, albeit, a little curtly, and you answered as to what work you contributed to the AI cornerstones given to you.

We don't need to be insulting...

One love

Your images look great. That's not the point. Everything that is generated in Midourney looks great, and it's all just a pastiche of stolen work. That is just fact. No artist in their dataset ever opted in, and no one can opt out. You can't use their software and not engage with stolen work.

As I said, I'm not singling you out, and I'm far from alone in this opinion. Watch the video. There are a great many people who feel this way; that it's a very bad thing for artists.

When I say I've hit a wall, I'm saying that every feed on every social media site I'm on is inundated with this stuff, and I'm echoing a LOT of artists who are justifiably angered by the obvious ethical breach being committed by these AI companies. I'm not speaking of the users (although I do think you make an ethical choice when engaging with the product) and I'm not accusing you of theft. You clearly put in (some amount of) time on these images. They're flawless, so I apologize for the disrespect.

My contempt is for Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and all of the rest of them. I think they're bad for artists, and I don't think their intentions are even at all good or honorable. Concept artists are immediately obsolete. A lot of people will lose jobs. I just think it's bad for culture in general.

But I apologize for taking it out on you. That was wrong.

Curtly? He basically called me a thief of other artists. And I'M the one being insulting? In my old childhood neighborhood in Chicago, a guy might likely catch a hand to the face for saying that to someone they dont know. I mean the title of the thread was very quite specific I felt. It didn't say MY ART. The plain as day implication is that I created it as a showcase, very intentionally so, to push the limit of render fidelity. A very specific variety of images were chosen and, AGAIN, clearly made (i.e the hard multi-frame pastiche ones) to outline their function as artist style Mashup prompts.

Again, images were very intentionally chosen to show the difference between clear and painstakingly cultivated image compositions VS prompt only input artist collages... for the purpose of showcasing an approaching upper limit of resolution. When I typed "or is to say what I can do with it" (as in a process that can be learned and cultivated with 10s of thousands of server hours...and several hundreds of actual MAN hours put in, to finally get to THAT level within just the past 24 hrs), I mean just that. Hell, even having my eyes water up at the completion of those space imgs at the exact time my song playlist jumped to the 'Cosmic Rockers: "the wadering of humanity"' track oddly enough. And then working up the nerve to feel some small level of self satisfaction for the first time in a really long time and line of consecutive mistakes, defeats etc. which finally felt like a W... and also to be compelled to share the results as example of something others can reach especially after some really atrocious nightcafe/midjourney results I posted in this subforum back in July,to then to be met like I was. To be told ive stolen that 1 thing that felt like a small step towards something which didnt make me feel like human flotsam for 2 whole minute. But yeah... I got you! He's asking important questions.

Look, i mean, i dont disagree that there's a larger duscussion to be had. I mean thats absolutely and completely not what this thread was supposed to be about? Not that i cant handle criticisms or want the dialogue shut down. Far from it, im pretty well engaged in it right fuckin now. But there was no deception or pretense whatsoever in what was proferred here. Moreover I'm quite excited to go see that video to get a counter perspective.

With that said... I'll just throw this out there too. Text input AI generated art is just another tool of compositional, temporal and laborious off-loading like anything else out there. The people that reall bother me most are those who want to hold all the keys to the realm, like a fundamentalist mindset. Wide and long is the road to ruin, and narrow is the path to enlightenment. Even lesser still are those who find the kingdom of heaven. Lookey here. Digital art is meant to be a relatively disposable variety of art anyway. The people who will be looking to profit in that field WANT to offload their energy in service of the story telling that is congruent to the intended mediums (gaming, animation, filmmaking). Arguably some intermediary forms like PRINT (LOOKING AT YOU comics, graphic novels, book illustration... and arguably more "artistic" forms of photogtaphy. Kind of) are susceptible I'll admit. Does that mean pencil and ink guys are in trouble... or? Well this is where, for now, scaling up dramatically can set artists in these fields apart. They're gonna have to go semi mural scale, where the offset of processing power limitation as it relates to time/cost will be in the formers favor. At least for well established artists. The pen and pencil have been going away for some time... which could in turn drive material scarcity and value in the end. Couldn't say how it'll go, or if it will go.. away.

For the rest of the artists, they're not 8n trouble. Rich people, barring a large subset of cryptokings, still pay for "clout", critical acclaim.. and physical media. Which for the past several hundred years has been overwhelmingly a posthumous affair. Leaving the ends part and parcel of 2nd hand market financiers. That has enjoyed a relatively modest climb out of the detritus field for the past 40+ years. So when I hear this unsung cry for little guy, I naturally react with a mild mixture of skepticism and curiosity.


Whats more... i truly believe Art starts in the unconscious. And traces it's way up the mind from there. How it gets out is less important to me the older I get. The less time I have on this earth the less I find myself bothered by the ebbing and flowing of financial markets, and particularly when they're tied to ART. For me the love is tethered to the themes > aesthetics > craft work. Usually in that order, except with specific regard to function as to which side I approach from. Custom furnishings for the home tend to go in the reverse hierarchy of relevancy as a counter example.

Humanity is going to reach an AUTOMATION singularity no matter what we do at this point anyway... Leaving the problem of fiat currency a major barrier to life quality for 99% of ppl at this stage of evolution, barring massive environmental upheaval getting in the way. The argument against digital art "automation" seems like a rather small bag of quickly rotting potatoes in the grand scheme of it all... to me anyway.

Read above. Not calling you a thief, and I apologized for the rest.

As for most of the rest of what you just wrote, agree to disagree.

I appreciate that and water under the bridge now. But i still don't know how you can say it's all stolen. If I take and input my own stock photo images into the AI prompt generator and do that several times to get a collective of various size renders and then assemble in a image editing software and further run that thru the AI the whole time only using shaders vfx and camera / color / filter tech modifier inputs... how can you say it's stolen from other artists? I dont think you can. Maybe I should make an "honest artists guide to AI process" video at this point. But anyway... yeah. Agree to disagree at this point 👍


Gonna go watch that video now. I'm sure there's a flotilla of factors I haven't accounted for.

Because the dataset that Midjourney pulls from is basically whatever floats online. No one opted into that dataset and no one can opt out. You can run your stock images through the AI as many times as you like; the data that is making your product is absolutely stolen.

Do watch the video. There's a lot of information there that I guess will surprise you.

I can definitely enjoy some of the art presented here, although a lot of it is missing 'something' for me personally.


But knowing how the AI datasets are 'procured', saps a lot of the joy I could experience from looking at much of this.

I am reminded of Industrial Society and their Future, this technology is damaging to actual organic human beings, and it will lead to great damage to the people making the art that the dataset is composed of, because those people will receive nothing for their 'contribution' to the AI.

Frankly, this is quintessentially capitalism, the sacrifice of qualitative life for many a person, in the pursuit of a bottom line, regardless of the implications.

I think the title is appropriate, midjourney can put a lot of people out of business, and upon the corpse of the industry, the AI company/ies will build its house, and proudly exclaim their superiority. The fact that no matter how good you get at prompts, that at some point the human element of prompts gets automated as well, just push a button and the AI vomits work at ridiculous pace. I can imagine that the logical conclusion of all of this, ends up with people 'professionally' sifting through the pictures, in search of something fitting for their use.

I'm starting to get why in Frank Herbert's Dune technology is limited to mechanical things. To quote "We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!" (roughly page 556-557 in Children of Dune)

We're heading towards the precipice, and many of us are happy about it.

That's almost exactly like saying none of your thoughts came from you or your efforts because every word or concept you use came from someone else. Doesn't account for your ability to combine say prior physics concepts of other scientists to formulate your own new hypothesis or theory.

More importantly your claim would only bear out truth if every dataset used was based ONLY on artwork. If I chose a specific color, or cmyk color palette modifier, does that mean the artwork is stolen because the cmyk palette was digitally recreated? Better let everyone who uses a home printer know the deal too.

Edit: okay I'm watching now. So far he's making a passionate argumemt, I feel bad already 6 mins in!

I'm sorry. I don't want to argue, but your comparison is ludicrous, and yes, changing the color... still stolen data.

Manipulated stolen data is still stolen data. Color correction doesn't indemnify one from copyright theft.

It's a bit naive to always put everything on the personal level. Each of our actions are also part of a larger movement of actions, shared by other humans, that shapes the world around us, and therefore we must be aware of the implications of these actions. I, personally, think that the consequences are really bad.

No one here is criticizing you or your art, specifically. The talking is about the future of art, and the future of man, consequently. And yes, maybe it is pretentious, because who the fuck am I to care about the future of humanity, since I probably don't understand anything...but someone is just like that.

Having said that, some images are really impressive, and the feeling that "something is lacking" is simply a sort of placebo effect of the human mind that doesn't want to accept such a thing.

Oh, nothing is lacking. I've seen Midourney images that are completely astounding, and almost all are pretty impressive out of the box with no post-processing.

That's just not the point.

Like most digital artists I love to embrace new tools, new tech. I've been tempted to try it myself, just as a lot of artists have, but I make the choice not to feed this thing that I think is exploitive and unethical in the extreme, and the possible ramifications of which I suspect are very serious.

I just don't want to consent or be complicit in what it's becoming.

Absolutely. We are be used to train something which is anything but transparent in its motives.

(Other than making massive, tax-free profits, but they're doing their best to bury that one too.)

We all know how dangerous artists can be in the eyes of authoritarians - no wonder they want to get rid of them/you/us.

I suggest we game the system by spamming it repeatedly with the prompt "a massive, stinking turd" or similar.

I think you converted me. I'm not 100% sure on that at the moment but the guy in that video laid it out much more comprehensively than i had anticipated. This is a much more complex topic than first seemed at surface value. There's a lot I'd have to independently verify before I could give any last word on where I stand.

But For what's it worth, you definitely picked the correct video. Well done

The video really lays out the concerns about hedge fund capital and the risk to us all - artists or not - in clear detail. It takes the saying "if it's free, then you're the product," to the next level.

There's a guy to whom I owe my gratitude, too, who first pointed out to me years ago that the goal of all this is to take away the very moment in which you exist and sell it back to you. What Steven Zapata says in his video very much echoes that sentiment.

I agree completely. And I like that he makes very clear that there is an equitable business model wherein artists opt in and are compensated for their participation; these companies simply don't care to operate in this manner.

It's not the tech that people should fear; it's the way in which it is implemented - and what people need to know is that the way it's being used at present is exploitive and immensely damaging.

Here is another, longer conversation about the ethics involved, with Steven Zapata and Karla Ortiz (another vocal proponent of legislative remedy):

https://www.proko.com/le...ou-can-do-about-it/notes

The host is a mealy mouthed weenie (although he is a talented artist), but it's a very interesting conversation, and both Zapata and Karla Ortiz are on point throughout.