【AI Drawing丨Midjourney Series Tutorial 2】—First knowledge of Midjourney, the super-hot AI painting artifact

Starting today, with Midjourney leading the charge, let us begin to explore a series of revolutionary works in the field of AI, including Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, etc., and learn the magic and its spells of these new ages.

written in front

The official documentation is the best way to get started. Compared with the dazzling array of courses on the market, official documents are usually the preferred way to learn new skills. It comes directly from the product creator and can provide the most authentic, comprehensive and up-to-date product information, as well as best practices and sample DEMO. Of course, there are also many well-planned courses with good word-of-mouth, carefully identify and consume carefully, and avoid being captured by the eye-catching headlines and anxiety generated by new media platforms.

Course Design

Course purpose: This course aims to give everyone an understanding of the Midjourney platform and how to use it, and explore the potential of Midjourney through commercial applications and some drawing challenges.

Course Nature : Free

Course format : graphic/subscription number

Course content: Preliminary setting of the following chapters

Meet Midjourney, the super popular AI painting artifact.
Midjourney basics and advanced techniques
Commercial Applications of Midjourney AI Painting: Desktop Backgrounds, Book Illustrations, Posters, Logos, Promotional Ads, Icons
Challenge: Use Midjourney AI to draw the perfect woman conceived by Luo Ji, the protagonist of "Three-Body Problem 2" -- Zhuang Yan
Challenge: TBD
Other excellent intelligent AI image tools + auxiliary artifacts

What is Midjourney?

Midjourney is an online AI image generation tool, which can generate corresponding images according to the text description (Prompt) entered by the user. Midjourney has a built-in huge neural network model, which acquires the ability to generate pictures by learning a large number of pictures. After the user enters a text description, Midjourney will parse the description, understand the picture elements and scenes that the user wants, and then use its built-in neural network model to generate a new matching picture.

Official website: https://www.midjourney.com/

Use: use Discord robot + instructions to complete human-computer interaction (the focus of Chapter 2)

Is Midjourney hot?

Of course, it is popular. In addition to being widely disseminated on major social and new media platforms, course sales that keenly capture business opportunities can also be seen everywhere, and there are even Midjourney courses for children.

Below, we use real-time data from the four major platforms of Google Trends, Baidu Index, WeChat Index, and Wechat Hotspot to visually present the current popularity of Midjourney. Google Trends uses the popularity index to record changes in popularity. A single indicator cannot show how hot it is. We add two keywords, ChatGPT (OpenAI product, the hottest at the moment) and NewBing (Microsoft product) as reference parameters. As shown in the figure, the popularity is not excellent. On a global scale, we temporarily define it as having popularity.

Google Trends (Worldwide)

We narrowed the scope to China, and the popularity immediately rose a lot. Compared with ChatGPT, which is particularly capable of playing, as an AI product in the single image field, Midjourney is also very popular.

Google Trends (China scope)

Baidu Index directly discloses the popularity index of keywords, the data is also considerable, and its information index is increasing rapidly.

Baidu index comparison

Baidu Information Index is exploding

Nowadays, with the vigorous development of new media platforms, the ways for users to obtain information have become diversified and multi-platform, and are no longer limited to Baidu search. This greatly reduces the persuasiveness of Baidu Index (keyword search and public information volume). We refer to the index trend of micro-hotspots (Note), and find that the gap between Midjourney and ChatGPT has narrowed significantly, and it has become more and more popular. This should be because on the new media platform, the visual elements are more attractive and can achieve information dissemination more easily.

Note: Sources of micro-hotspot data, Chinese Internet big data and Sina Weibo official data aggregation

Micro hotspot heat trend in the past 7 days

Finally, let’s take a look at the data of the WeChat index. The data sources of the WeChat index are mainly Souyisou, video accounts, public account articles, web pages and the popularity of some advertising channels. From the trend in the figure below, we can see that since late March Since then, the data has continued to grow. When collecting data, ChatGPT was originally planned to be included in the comparison. However, the daily index of tens of millions shocked me. ChatGPT should open a new chapter.

WeChat index

In addition to these four official data platforms, there are also many independent data analysis platforms in China, such as Huo Suan Shu, Cicada Mama, Diandian and Feigua Data, etc. These platforms can also conduct popularity trend analysis for new media platforms such as Douyin and Xiaohongshu. Friends who are interested may wish to give it a try.

Why is Midjourney popular?

I would like to take the product concept of the founder of Midjourney as the first reason, " AI is not a replica of the real world, but an extension of human imagination ."

The whole process of Midjourney from its birth to its rise, and then to its natural and generous profits, is breathtaking. This entrepreneurial team, consisting of only 11 people, has no financial return target pressure, and no pressure from investors to raise funds. Their product then managed to attract 10 million+ community members and achieve over $100 million in subscription revenue. This in itself is like AI creation, the process is full of imagination, and the results are amazing.

2. Internal driving factor: excellent high-quality content

The pictures generated by Midjourney are rich in details and full in color, which are very close to real photos or the effects created by illustrators. At the end of the article, related works are attached.

3. External support platform: relying on the Discord social network

Discord is a powerful and community-oriented communication platform, especially suitable for gamers and various interest groups. Attached to Discord's strong community attributes, Midjourney can easily gather many fans with the same hobbies to form a community, allowing creators to magnify their imagination, share and disseminate. This is the high-quality soil for Midjourney's rapid growth. Good wind relies on strength!

4. Promotion of emergencies

In August 2022, an artist named Jason Allen won the first prize in the art competition held at the Colorado State Fair in the United States. His work was generated using Midjourney (below).

Award-winning work "Space Opera House" Jason Allen via Midjourney

Allen is more obsessed with the "Space Opera" series. He spent more than 80 hours on this award-winning work called "Space Opera", making more than 900 iterations, constantly adding/adjusting some words to fine-tune The tone and feel of the work. The judges, however, did not realize that the work was generated by AI. This incident caused Midjourney's users to surge from 300,000 to 1.5 million within a month.

5. Other key points

Easy-to-use, low-threshold user experience

After joining Discord, enter a description (prompt) to generate an image, the simplest human-computer interaction.

Reasonable pricing strategy

Now Midjourney has canceled the free trial quota. Excellent work, someone will always pay for it.

Continuous learning and iteration, continuous evolution

Since the launch of the Midjourney Alpha version in 2018, it has gone through Alpha, Beta, 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 versions, and the 5.0 version will also be launched on March 15, 2023. It can be opened by manually setting or using the Prompt parameter, as shown below, Experience a distinctive product form.