AI, or Artificial Intelligence is now at the forefront of just about everything. Almost every piece of software has so called AI built in. Is it really AI, most likely not, but it probably helps sell software. Wether it is or isn’t true AI is in some ways irrelevant, software and algorithms today are capable of doing incredible things that used to be the domain of skilled craftsmen, writers, illustrators, photographers, musicians etc. The list goes on and on. Skills that we thought would never be assigned to lines of code are now proving that theory wrong.
I must confess, I like certain aspects of AI. For the last two years I’ve been experimenting with Midjourney, an AI illustration and photography bot. There has been a huge improvement in the quality of output in the 2 years that I’ve been using it. I can only imaging that this will replace a lot of photography and illustration in the future if it has’t already. In fact, most of the images on this website are generated by Midjourney!
All the images to the right have been generated by Midjourney, all created from simple text input and then left to the bot to determine the output. For example, the image of the warehouse was created from the following description:
“a huge fully automated warehouse with robot picking machines selecting boxes to be despatched”
Below is a couple of images created as a test to see what food photography could look like.
As you can see, the results are remarkable and getting better all the time. I know someone who’s written a children’s book and has struggled to find illustrators who can create characters in the style she’s after. She’s had a go at using Midjourney and was surprised by the results. So much so, that she’s going to try and use it for all the illustrations!
