A friend emailed me today to tell me that he had joined Midjourney. If you don’t know what Midjourney is, it is an AI application that can generate images based on user input.

Steve decided to type in ‘Bruce Percy photography’, and this is what it generated.

Apart from it looking a bit dream-like (which by the way, is one of my own intentions when creating images), I can see parallels, and similarities, even though it is not exactly like my own work.

So I spent the best part of an hour trying to set up my own MidJourney account, and all I can say is that I felt I was back in the land of working on open source software with not much help, and getting nowhere. Things aren’t working for me, so I haven’t gotten very far.

But I have to ask the questions:

1) how long will it be, before this starts to look so convincingly like real photography, rather than some weird dream?

and perhaps more specifically:

2) how long before we have photographers publishing work created in these AI programs? How long before we see work that is so convincing that we don’t know if it’s a real photograph or AI?

For anyone out there who has a USP with their art, it does make me wonder how long before everyone is not far away from creating work just like theirs? I’m not trying to be all ‘doom’ about this. I am fascinated by the boundaries. Will we be able to spot an AI generated piece of art from a human created one? And if so, what will be the tells? I think it will get to the point where it will be impossible to do so.

So where does this end? What about music? What about books and stories?

Will the ‘art’ in creating anything, be about how you work with AI and use it, rather than just letting it create itself?

Quite intriguing.

Then Steve noticed it has also generate some portraits as well based on ‘Bruce Percy photography’. In case you aren’t aware, I have made portrait photos in the past. I haven’t done much in a long while, but I do have some portraits on this site if you go check. But here are Midjourney’s interpretations of my portraiture work:

Quite dreamy. They sort of remind me of Susan Burnstine’s imagery. More in the focussing, and blur techniques applied.