Art via artificial intelligence: With these tools you can try it yourself

Everyone should try this: Fantastic pictures that you can generate yourself. All you have to do is enter a text. That sounds dreamy, doesn’t it?

The term “artificial intelligence” is currently being used in an inflationary manner and yet – or perhaps because of it – very few ordinary people know what it actually is and how it works.

An exciting research project called Midjourney is changing that with immediate effect. Here you can lend a hand and have creative works of art produced. All you have to do is enter a small text. We will show you how the tool works in the beta phase.

Step 1: Create a Discord account

Midjourney’s public beta is currently taking place on Discord, a free chat platform. You can use this either as software on the desktop or directly in the browser.

If you don’t already have a free account, you must first create one. Our Midjourney download will then take you to the official chat server, where you can generate your own images. There are numerous commands available for this.

Step 2: Find a channel and get started

Midjourney’s Discord server offers you various chat rooms to let off steam. For example, simply switch to one of the newcomer rooms and you will already see the AI ​​images of the other users.

To do this, enter the command “/imagine” in the chat, followed by an English description of the image you want to create. It doesn’t have to be a coherent sentence, a collection of keywords separated by commas is sufficient. example

/ imagine frankenstein’s monster, blue light, painting, dark

In a minute or less, the AI ​​then creates a selection of four low-quality images. Here you can choose between different buttons:

• Upscale: The buttons with U1 to U4 allow you to have the selected motif calculated in higher resolution.

• Variation: Alternatively, you can create further variants of a motif with the buttons V1 to V4. Repeat this step as often as you like to get the desired result.

If you have already scaled up an image, additional buttons will appear:

• Make Variations: does exactly the same as the V buttons

• Upscale to Max: scales the image up to about 1664 x 1664 pixelsLight

• Upscale Redo: upscale again like the U buttons, only with less detail

You can finally click on the final image and then select “Show original” at the bottom left. Now you see the maximum resolution and can download the image.

Tips for better pictures in Midjourney

If you have a specific result in mind, then you should refine the text accordingly. Midjourney can also handle long lists, always separated by commas.

If you want a realistic style, for example, then the following keywords at the end of the description can help:

• hyperrealistic

• unreal engine

• 4K or 8K

• extremely detailed

Certain drawing techniques also help to influence the result, for example:

• water colour
• charcoal drawing
• pencil drawing
• graffiti
• vector style

If necessary, use a translation tool such as DeepL if you do not know the English terms. If you have a specific artist in mind, just enter a name in the text and the AI ​​will render the image in their signature style.

Midjourney: The best parameters for images

There are other practical parameters that you should know. These always start with two minus signs and should be at the end of your image description.

• use –ar16:9 to change the aspect ratio from square to regular landscape
• with –w 1920 –h 1080 you can determine the exact resolution, simply change the digits for width (w) and height (h)
• the –no parameter helps you to exclude certain elements from the image, for example “–no trees”
• the –stylize function determines how much stylized the image should be, just add a value from 0 to 2500
• if you want a wider variety of ideas, specify –chaos and a value between 0 and 100
• the –quality command also allows higher quality images to be produced, but a value of “2” takes twice as long and costs twice as much

A list of all available commands can be found in the English manual.

Integrate Midjourney in your own Discord server

If you have your own Discord server, then you can invite the Midjourney bot there as well. To do this, select the bot in the official Midjourney discord and click “Add to server”.

After that, select your server on which you are an administrator. You can also easily create this beforehand, even if you are the only member.

The advantage of this is that hundreds of other users cannot see your pictures and simply copy them.

The big catch: A maximum of 25 images in the free version

If you’re already really keen on creating your own images in Midjourney, then here’s the little setback: you can only have a maximum of 25 images created.

The pre-selections with the four single images as well as the variations and scaled-up images are deducted from this contingent. Unfortunately, the fun is over far too quickly. But at least you can still watch the other users as they create creative works.

There are various paid models starting at $10 a month. You don’t pay for the number of images, but for the GPU minutes. The higher the quality, the longer the GPU calculates and the fewer images you can ultimately produce for the same money.

Alternative to Midjourney: DreamStudio

Admittedly, signing up for Midjourney is quite complicated if you don’t already have a Discord account. If you want to try something simpler, you can also use DreamStudio, which uses the “Stable Diffusion” AI.

Here you just need to sign in with your Google account or quickly create a free account. After that, you can enter an English text below and change the parameters by slider.

Please note that the higher the quality, the more credits are used per image. You only have 200 of these in the test version, after that 1,000 credits each cost around 10 euros – that’s more expensive compared to the currently unlimited images at Midjourney for 30 euros.

Image rights at KI Kunst: How can the works be used?

Now the question is: who owns the rights to these pictures if the artist is an artificial intelligence? The makers of Midjourney describe this in detail in their Terms of Service:

Free members may use the works under the Creative Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International license. This means that you are welcome to distribute the pictures privately, but you must add a photo credit. The generated images may not be used for commercial purposes.

With Stable Diffusion, on the other hand, the generated images end up in the public domain. That means anyone can use them.