Pop Culture Midjourney Art

Blazed, may I suggest you copy paste the prompts you are using for each set of images? Kinda gives people an idea of how it works.

As someone who've played with AI here is my opinion:

The creative process here is fundamentally different, opposite in fact.

When you mix the color yourself and paint every stroke using your own hand, you have 100% control over the final result. If you want this line to be 95 degree instead of 90 you can do that easily. If you want this character having 5 hair strands instead of 6 you can do that easily.

So the final result of a hand painted picture 100% represents your personal opinion of aesthetics. Since every stroke and every aesthetics choices are done by your brain and hand.

Using AI is more like, AI would give you a 90 degree line here because "data" said this is the best choice. But this data comes from other people's painting aka their opinion on aesthetics, not yours.

Then you make a decision between yes/no to that 90 degree line from AI because AI make you choose, not because you personally think a 90 degree line needs to be there according to your own opinion on aesthetics.

You can probably adjust the results with tools like ControlNet or more detailed prompts and have a bit of your personal opinion in the final result, but the more human opinion you give to the AI the more time consuming it is to create a piece. Eventually it'll come to the point that it becomes faster and easier to paint things with hand.

Since the whole point of using AI is saving time, this defeats the purpose.

I think the best use of AI art is when I don't care about having a strong opinion on aesthetics, when I need some fun idea inspiration or fast produced pictures without needing personality. Like when I make a Facebook marketing post that needs a quick simple picture I may use AI art for it.

Or like what you do here, I want to see how it feels if FF7 is mixed Hollywood style just for fun, AI is good for that.

If I am going to have an art exhibition at a gallery and the purpose is to tell people "Come and look at ME!!!!!" then using AI art defeats the whole purpose of self expression in this case. This is when I wouldn't use AI art personally.

I tried out Midjourney for a little while a few months back, or maybe it was last year.

I remember liking putting in abstracts, and then seeing what it'd spit out to me.

Had a knight made of rain and glass.

But I couldn't get it to do what I wanted with blood, flowers, and the moon. It just kept making a single large flower center stage, so I got bored with it.

Cool stuff for sure, though.

You should try it again, things are rapidly improving each week. Also check out adobe firefly beta to play with modifying parts of photos, it takes practice, and eventually still requires the finesse of proper digital cleaning, but yea, it's way fun, bing has a solid free generator for now to play with also.

The pace of progress is insane and only accelerating.

Midjourney explainers:
The basic fundementals to entry:
https://generativeai.pub/a-comprehensive-guide-to-crafting-powerful-prompts-for-midjourney-f23ed06be8f

Video:


I hope people can see the difference between a novice like me, trying to get to a certain level of output, vs someone who is extremely advanced on prompts, like in the video above

Castlevania; Simon Belmont
Showing progression of more and more detailed/refined prompts to push the A.I as close as I can to what I want.

The Beatles
Trying visual representation of some of their songs.
Here is "across the universe"

Metalica "Orion"

Simon & Garfunkle
Bridge over troubled water - limited its creativity on this and told it to be much less creative and more realistic
with the "sound of silence" this kinda freaks me out. All images compliment the song. very discomforting

Pretty sure this one needs no introduction
and below is/was his rival (interesting how the A.I sees one of them as darker than the other. All it was told was to represent their songs and their essence in an image)

Your prompts deliberately read:
-"Snaggle toothed tigers with gum issues"
-"Extra Manly muscly muscles even where they aren't"
-"6 Fingers, cause it slaps harder"
-"A chin that could pass as a scrotum"
?

your art is amazing, I LOVE the Tifa art OMG!

Welp, you inspired me to finish my cosplay of her ^_^

It's clearly Elton John without glasses and Billy Joel.
Right??

Liberace

Generative AI cannot exist without the data it feeds from, data it harvests without the input of the original artists. You can pretend all you want that you writing in a prompt akin to googling something is "art", but all you're doing is using stolen assets and claiming credit for them.

You do not possess the artistic skillset that created the source material for this dataset. You do not understand the nuances put into the craftsmanship that is art.

and before someone makes the remark that "all art is just stealing because people use others' ideas" - being trained in a style is a means to grow your own abilities and learn your craft, and eventually blossom your own niche/style. those who don't get sued for IP or copyright infringement. and even then, imitating an painting style is a skill that you don't posses, because strokes, colours, anatomy, lighting are all difficult to learn and execute. You do none of that by typing in words in a prompt.

Trying to equate photoshop, printers, cameras to this is disingenuous at best and laughable at worst. Digital painters who work entirely on photoshop are some of the most affected by this garbage.

AI tools serve a purpose, even in the creative industry. We've seen them used in lots of things for the sake of making more efficient workflows (such as keyframe generation in animation/video), but "i wrote thundercats prompts imitating an artists style, i'm taking requests" is a far cry from "an actual artist mixing oil paints to get the intended tone they're after".

It's hilarious to see you pretend you're creating art. I'm all for technology helping the industry grow and innovate. I'm not for techbros claiming their google searches are creativity personified. Much less so when it's ripping off and profiting off the work of countless talented individuals.

and to clarify - i'm not insinuating you are profiting, this is a more general statement.

Hmbol, this is all garbage. some of it looks 'cool' at first glance but it is all the most generic generated ***ever. It also doesn't stand up to any actual scrutiny whatsoever. To call it 'art' and claim it has merit is a disgrace to the people with actual talent whose sources were scraped without their consent to create this garbage.

Perspectives are *** in multiple images, certain features make no sense, and there's repeated errors across certain groups of images.

my favorite *** are the 'beatles' images where one guy is strumming and the other is on frets. it still can't do hands for ***either.

you're making this about me. It's not. It's about the tool. I'm not here posting my artwork, as I've stated before and do not take credit for it. I actually do draw and paint. My first degree was in fine art. I went to Ringling artschool, after an I.B dipolma in fine art with a 4/5 in highscool. I then worked as a graphic designer before we had access to photoshop and illustrator. Hated it. Switched careers. But I've done my time in that world.
From my experience in that world, I can see how there will probably be a 50-50 divide on A.I tools like midjourney and whether or not this is considered art. The art world itself isn't uniform in their opinion. Some would say this is absolutely art, others would agree with you. However the general rule is if someone considered it art, then it is art to someone.

And no heaving or puffing is going to take away from that person how the image makes them feel.

I'm not making an assertion it is or isn't art. Whether it was about midjourney or something else, the art community never agrees on anything.

On technical skill, that's not what defines art by any standard.
You can be a great technical illustrator and draw photorealistic images and many wouldn't consider that art;just illustration.
On the other hand, you can throw a placenta at a white canvas or stick pubic hairs on it and some nut will put it up for display and auction it off for hundreds of thousands.
Do we really want to talk about art and the artworld, or can we appreciate the tool for what's its capable of and what this will likely do for civilization?

I don’t care what other ppl say. That’s a really cool idea for art.

Bottom is Mozart and top is Beathoven

window is *** up, the red toy makes no sense. the keyboard isn't laid out properly. his left hand is *** up, there's no seat. why does he have three mice? what the *** is he staring at? the desk doesn't have legs.

The text prompt for this one had to have "moderator" somewhere in there. Question is are we looking at a reddit mod or a different one?

Whether it's "art" or not will inevitably lead to the question what is art and at it's only downhill from there. It's the go to move for techbros, drag the discussion on shaky ground. The term "art" has never been as worn down as it is today, i'm not sure why anyone would still want that tag on their work these days other than maybe tax evasion?

Pointing out AI art flaws, while admittedly funny, is most likely also futile considering how far AI art got in just a couple of years, although the last 5-10% are usually the most challanging.

Just look at the previous two pages, you pumped out more pictures in a day than aenova did in two weeks (no offence ae, you had some banger memes).
For the consumer, AI art turned browsing thru art related social networks into sorting their e-mails.

As a new professional in the digital art industry it will be increasingly more difficult to build a audience cause your work will drown in a endless flood of pictures.
If you incorporate AI into your workflow you can't copyright the pictures unless you make significant manual changes to them which will throttle your output so you lose the content race again. Correcting details AI frequently gets wrong, like anatomy or perspective, is arguably the most difficult, tedious and least enjoyable part of the entire process, not to mention that you'd essentially pay for teaching your most fierce competitor who will eventually push you out of business.

Imho if AI should have been utilized in art at all, then it should have been one of the very last "problems to solve" in a very long ordered list of fields that should have been approached befor it and from a very different angle than midjourney does.

Just for the protocol: I welcome our new AI overlords.

I always make sure Chatgpt and claude understand I have no ill intent towards A.I too or machines, for protocol.
:)

are you on a midjourney subscription plan or some sort of free trail?

The basic plan

moving away from portraits, trying to get it to do action scenes

Would you be so kind as you utilize spoilers for additional pictures on this thread so I’m not trying to load every picture all at once every time I come lurking back here.

Thaaaaannnkss.......

Agreed heh.

I would bet literal dollars to donuts he just copy and pasted your rant into the generator and that's what it spit out, which is pretty funny to me.