I decided to try out cubefox’s prompts on current Midjourney to give a sense of it
It actually did pretty well. I think my previous “hrm, it doesn’t seem as good” was when I was specifically trying to get it to generate images for LessWrong posts, where it seemed to be defaulting to very generic landscapes (or generic women’s faces). I’ll try a round of those on recent curated posts.
I tried again with a recent curated post, just putting in the title. (historically, practice I usually start with the post title and see if that outputs anything interesting, and then started exploring other ideas based on my understanding of the post and what visuals I thought would be good. But, this is pretty time consuming, so seeing what the “one shot” result is is useful).
Here’s “Liability regimes for AI, watercolor painting”, from the latest Midjourney (v6)
for contrast, here’s what Midjourney 4 resulted in:
(I kinda like the Lady Justice optin)
Midjourney v3
v2
Midjourney v3 feels like hit some kind of sweet spot of “relatively high quality” but also “a bit more weird/quirky/dreamlike.”
I went and tried to do Midjourney v3, this time putting in more “quality” words since it isn’t automatically trained on aesthetics as hard:
”Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res:
okay now I guess I’ll just wander back up the chain of versions, this time using my Metis on what kinds of prompts will get better results rather than seeing how it handles the dumbest case:
“Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res –– Midjourney V4
“Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res—MJ version 6
I preferred your v4 outputs for both prompts. They seem substantially more evocative of the subject matter than v6 while looking substantially better than v3, IMO.
(This was a pretty abstract prompt, though, which I imagine poses difficulty?)
Oh, so current Midjourney is actually far better than Dall-E 3 in terms of aesthetics. One thing I still liked about the old Dall-E 2.5 was its relatively strong tendency towards photorealism. Because arguably “a cat reading a book” describes an image of an actual cat reading a book, rather than an image of an illustration of a cat reading a book, or some mixture of photo and Pixar caricature, as in the case of Dall-E 3. Though this could probably be adjusted with adding “a photo of”.
I decided to try out cubefox’s prompts on current Midjourney to give a sense of it
It actually did pretty well. I think my previous “hrm, it doesn’t seem as good” was when I was specifically trying to get it to generate images for LessWrong posts, where it seemed to be defaulting to very generic landscapes (or generic women’s faces). I’ll try a round of those on recent curated posts.
I tried again with a recent curated post, just putting in the title. (historically, practice I usually start with the post title and see if that outputs anything interesting, and then started exploring other ideas based on my understanding of the post and what visuals I thought would be good. But, this is pretty time consuming, so seeing what the “one shot” result is is useful).
Here’s “Liability regimes for AI, watercolor painting”, from the latest Midjourney (v6)
for contrast, here’s what Midjourney 4 resulted in:
(I kinda like the Lady Justice optin)
Midjourney v3
v2
Midjourney v3 feels like hit some kind of sweet spot of “relatively high quality” but also “a bit more weird/quirky/dreamlike.”
I went and tried to do Midjourney v3, this time putting in more “quality” words since it isn’t automatically trained on aesthetics as hard:
”Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res:
okay now I guess I’ll just wander back up the chain of versions, this time using my Metis on what kinds of prompts will get better results rather than seeing how it handles the dumbest case:
“Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res –– Midjourney V4
“Liability regimes for AI”, beautiful aquarelle painting by Thomas Schaller, high res—MJ version 6
I preferred your v4 outputs for both prompts. They seem substantially more evocative of the subject matter than v6 while looking substantially better than v3, IMO.
(This was a pretty abstract prompt, though, which I imagine poses difficulty?)
I am not an artist.
Oh, so current Midjourney is actually far better than Dall-E 3 in terms of aesthetics. One thing I still liked about the old Dall-E 2.5 was its relatively strong tendency towards photorealism. Because arguably “a cat reading a book” describes an image of an actual cat reading a book, rather than an image of an illustration of a cat reading a book, or some mixture of photo and Pixar caricature, as in the case of Dall-E 3. Though this could probably be adjusted with adding “a photo of”.