u/Equal-Painter-5321

This is about the tool not the morality nor arguing about whether or not it is art. I don't expect to change anyones mind on any of those aspects of AI art. It occured to me that unless you use a particular generative AI you don't know what it can and can't do. They each have their own qualities.

I am not an advanced Midjourney user and even if I were different users have different goals and abilities and that matters in terms of how they experience Midjourney and even when they began to use it. I am grateful that I started on Discord because it has tools that have not migrated to the web. I think the migration happened with version 6 or just before that.

For those who don't know you can watch a Midjourney image developing. The bones appear first if there are any which is usually the case. Colour develops but often changes a lot before it settles. During that time the image is revealing itself. It is during the last stage that details emerge revealing style and details. Each image has a seed which can be thought of as a roll of a dice with billions of numbers on it.

Midjourney doesn't think. It doesn't make choices. It doesn't know what beautiful means. by its very nature it can only produce bland images unless instructed what to do in some manner. The roll of the dice, the seed, determines a myriad of complex variables. The more instruction it is given (within limits) the fewer variables it decides.

MJ desperately wants us to use "natural language" when prompting. We are paying for the privelege of getting to train MJ. We take great care in crafting prompts following best practices and then MJ overrides them. It classifies prompts as obscene when they are nothing of the sort. I am a 71 year old woman. I do have an interesting collection of MJ nudes MJ sent me unsolicited. For example I might have prompted "angels" and it throws in a nude. Sometimes I have perfectly decent images that MJ refuses to edit even though I am working with the original image that MJ created.

Midjourney has wonderous tools with which we can influence the images that will emerge but it can also be very frustrating to try to control.

My focus is on still images and style creation through the use and combining of profiles, moodboards, sref codes. Achieving real style consistency across subjects is very difficult. I am frustrated by the inability to get the color schemes I want coupled with the style I want. I want more direct control over degree of detail and over which aspects of an sref code I want to incorporate.

Midjourney and AI image generation isn't nearly as advanced as developers want us to think they are. They don't make choices. They collect data identifying commonalities and differences. AI responds to queries by predicting what we want based on the data available to it. It does not think or make independent choices.

I'd love to know how other people use MJ or any other image generators and your take on them. Not to debate anything. More like the blind men and the elephant, they each touched a different part of the elephant, the tail, the legs, the ears, the trunk, so all had different ideas of what an elephant looks like. None of them were wrong, or they were all wrong.

A kindergarden drawing stuck to the fridge is art. A banana taped to a wall is famous valuable art. A dress made of meat is art. If I screw an image of myself to a plank and call it "screwed" is that feminist art?

Very young children can take photographs. At what point does it become "art". What must they understand or be able to do to qualify as artists? Like beauty, art is in the eye of the beholder.

AI art has been successfully copyrighted when the human content is proven. " In a landmark decision, the U.S. Copyright Office granted its first copyright for a wholly AI-generated image to the company Invoke for a work titled "A Single Piece of American Cheese". Unlike simple prompt-generated art, this precedent-setting image was copyrighted because the artist used iterative "inpainting", making roughly 35 deliberate edits and proving human control."

How precise do you have to be to tape a banana to a wall? There is lots of AI art that is easily identifiable due to "artifacts". There is is a certain bland emptiness to some images because of the way AI constructs images. It does what is typical. Other times someone creates a fantastic image just by fluke but the image is still purposeless. There is no reason for the image to exist.

The images I develop on Midjourney begin in various ways. Sometimes it is sheer quantity of rolls. I keep generating the same image over and over and over again scanning hundreds of generations to find the one that clicks. There is usually something wrong with it that takes corrections both within and out of Midjourney. To construct what I want I often have to generate an image in parts then layer them in Photoshop, or change colors, or repair portions.

I love Midjourney passionately because I can follow my adhd heart and go off in myriad directions at the same time. Serious, light-hearted, dark, joyous, sweet images and images that make me laugh out loud. My preference is to work on creating consistent styles of my own through combinations of moodboards, style reference codes, image references and profiles I create.

I haven't tried to sell anything I have produced. I vacilate between "it's fantastic (for t-shirts)" to "everyone will hate it and I don't want to know". I have no problem confirming that I use AI as a tool. I have a problem with the way that it is portrayed. Sure, someone can use AI at the same level as a 5 year old using a camera. It doesn't mean everyone uses it that way.

If what I produce can be duplicated by anyone just by prompting then no one will want it. Even if it is genuinely original and objectively great art that doesn't mean anyone will agree while I am still alive.

The debate really isn't about art at all. It's about who has the right to earn a living by it.