hckrnws

Here is some example of images with code :

long dark, alaska, night

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/976997500349186119/10...

samurai, van gogh, portrait

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/976997500349186119/10...

black girl magic, reghal, cornrows, epic, majesty, warrior https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/976997500349186119/10...

temple, heaven, flowers https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/989739808286974002/10...

The output is quite cool, but why on earth have they locked interaction with it away in discord instead of having it available in the web? It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it, won't interact with it, and won't be able to view the results. It's just a deeply weird design decision.

It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it, won't interact with it, and won't be able to view the results.

That's good for now. It's early days and it's pretty busy already. I don't like Discord much but I'll admit it's a pretty good interface for something like MJ as you can see (and be inspired by) other people's prompts and discuss the process in a live way. The amount of realtime product feedback they are getting is amazing and it's fun watching it from the sidelines. The founder also does live calls on the voice channels where he talks about how things are going - it's a very interesting group experience for a product.

I'd argue Discord is great for attracting creative types. The number of HN comments complaining about how complicated Discord is (not yours so much, but the ones where people refuse to even countenance Discord at all) strikes me as odd given my assumption the typical HN user would be a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things.

> The number of HN comments complaining about how complicated Discord is (not yours so much, but the ones where people refuse to even countenance Discord at all) strikes me as odd given my assumption the typical HN user would be a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things.

I think I could be considered as a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things, and my avoidance of discord isn’t that it’s complicated (hard to use), it’s that it’s complicated (unnecessary busy). From the notifications being a lot of noise by default to threads being so much work to catch up on after the fact, it’s just heavy and dense and complicated.

Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.

> whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.

On larger servers discord has started defaulting to a feed channel summing up all the others and displaying popular messages/subthreads with a facebook/twitter type algorithm.

Discord is a slick chatroom experience, less good for asynchronous communication and really not secure.

I used to think that way too, but putting it on a social platform has a lot of benefits. New users who don’t know how to write prompts can learn from others and discover new artistic styles and concepts. It brought me up to speed much faster than DALL-E’s web based interface.

Probably has a split effect. I saw no way to interact without discord, close tab.

I know how to interact with discord, however I read the FAQ channel and it didn't answer the question "where do I type a prompt" or "how do I make it generate an image", so also closed tab

Same here. I'm not a gamer and Discord isn't a thing in my world. I simply closed the tab.

I’ve been playing with tech like this in various Discord servers for over a year now and I’m still fascinated every day. Knowing how incredible it is and then hearing people say “Sure. But, Discord. Ew.” is a shaking-my-head moment. The Discord interface is far from ideal. But, it has had a very high ROI for the small, low budget team behind Midjourney.

I don't know why. I use the Discord server and don't like it, my messages get lost in the scrollspam and it's just a bad experience. Surely, a text field on the site would have been equally good.

You can click to add the bot to your own server and use it privately with ease. It’s quite fun!

you don't get to see other's images and talk with them in a shared chat channel with that approach (unless they build out a lot more web app). Which is half the fun of it. (Not that hard to build, but more work than a Discord bot.)

Which is half the fun for /some/ people.

What people are saying (including me) is that it's not fun for them, and Discord feels like a big hindrance instead of a benefit.

I like FPSes but I don't like multiplayer games. So I play single player FPSes, even if they are worse, because multiplayer ones are not fun for me. Craiyon, DALLE 2, and Disco Diffusion all offer a less social and direct interface in the same space as MidJourney and may be better to experiment with until MJ provides some sort of Web interface, as I imagine they will at some point.

I don't care if it's discord or slack or whatsapp or thelatesthypedapp... I even have a discord account, I just don't understand why the author is introducing extra hurdles, stick it on the open web, that's the lowest friction and least platform dependence.

cool

I don't know, that might work for some but I would have prefered a webapp with a nice UI instead. I've subscribed for a month but the first time I discovered some of the parameters was just now when someone on HN linked to their docs. Had no idea they even had those.

The flow was invite -> public discord channel with other people that don't know about what prompts work well with their model -> run out of free GPU time -> subscribe -> move to private discord message where none of the social aspect matters.

This isn’t entirely true - when you move to the chat with the bot you still have access to the show and tell and prompt training channels as well as the newbie channels you started in. But you can create without posting in public as you iterate via the private chat with the bot. I believe the newbie channels even still work for image creation if you really want.

By the way, /help for the bot works. Surely we always try the help flags?

Fair enough, I guess there's value to the social feedback you get in discord and being able to easily see what others have input.

There isn't really, the majority of people in the channels are newcomers, it scrolls too fast for you to really see much, and once you subscribe you move to private and only see your own messages anyway.

I have no idea why they went to Discord, it hasn't provided any benefit to me personally, at least.

They have show and tell and prompt training channels. If you only hang out in the newbies channel then yes, it will be newbies.

True enough. I totally agree with you. without Discord if it will be normal web portal it will be very nice.

I know, the discord bot is calling a backend. It's not like their GPU-run model is somehow in discord. It's trivial to cross-post results to discord, and provide a web text prompt calling the same backend.

More likely, they are hiding from bots that will scrape / crosspost?

Probably easier for them to handle all the edge cases of a website via discord. I can imagine a situation where I’m focused on my backend and outsource UX to discord. I also think at this point they don’t need every user on earth, so if you can’t climb a gently sloping learning curve then they’ll catch you later - it appears they’re successful enough as it is. Finally I have to say the prompt training and show and tell discord channels are useful and I find a lot of material to help me innovate in the images I create (mostly in support of things I’m doing with my daughter like a lemonade stand logo and illustrations for its menu, etc)

They’re only just coming out of a restricted beta, so having it available to everyone is the opposite of what they were going for , so far.

I also read an interview with the CEO where he said they noticed that mostly people don’t know what to ask it to create, so they just input boring prompts (“a dog”) and, I’m guessing, walked away soon after. But together, seeing what others do, they went much further with it.

> It basically guarantees that most people won't know about it

They have close to a million users on their Discord, seems to work out not so bad... But I suppose the real reason was simply to save time and money.

To iterate fast and get something in the hands of users. I can guarantee they want their app on every platform under the sun someday, but things take time.

But I'm sure this is restricting the number of users who access it as "people who use discord" is a significantly smaller number than "people who use the web".

Discord solves a big problem for them: they are trying to give a limited number of uses to each user. They dont have to create their own proof of human infrastructure since discord already has some weak forms of that with sms verification.

This is obviously on purpose for the sake of the beta. Compute power is not free.

Easier to rate limit and easier to transition to selling access?

I for one will wait for secondary sources and if this is so great I might end up creating a Discord account. But not just to check out for myself if it's cool or not.

reddit.com/r/deepdream has a lot of Midjourney output.

Not true. Daily Dose of Internet mentioned it. Within a few weeks of that they came close to maxing out total Discord users on one server (1 million).

It is a strange choice, all right. I had some fun with Wombo, and this looks much more interesting - but I'm not going to go figure out Discord, and potentially have to deal with a bunch of crazy gamer kids, just to try it.

Presumably they will make a better interface available as they shift from early testing to productization.

You don’t have to figure out Discord or deal with “gamer kids”. You literally need 1 commands to use Midjourney.

You have to figure out Discord well enough that you have an account and know where to type in the commands, don't you? Is Discord not a chat service for gamers, or am I thinking of something else?

It is, but presumably you have seen a chat application before and thus already know where to type, and can deal with a totally standard website sign-up flow too. I don't like Discord, but it isn't difficult.

Midjourney users are sectioned off into separate rooms. For me, Discord ran into an updating bug and either they didn’t assign me to a room, or the app failed to surface the room. I had to force quit the app and restart it. I’m not familiar with Discord so I can’t comment if bugs like that are endemic or not but it doesn’t make a good first impression.

Okay I got to say I have never been both superimpressed with the product and yet confused how sucky it was to get to it. heres what happened 1. I see the post on HN 2. I click it. 3. I read comments, see people discuss why its on discord, and figure worth checking it out since I have discord 4. I had to log in with discord, go to their chat, 5. read the trial support room chat(webpage only had basic $10/month and premium $20/month plans) 6. finally suggesting I use the /imagine prefix to bring up the midjourney bot which will then take a text prompt or multiple prompts to send their ai engine to generate pretty image

7. To test I typed in our sun exploding in a super nova 8. In fractions of seconds the chatbot responded with the image 9. Here is the image ->https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/989268285575008376/10... 10. I feel I should have gotten to step 9 a lot sooner and they should make it obvious what this can do with a better demo or something 11. super cool, going to play with this rest of the day, thanks HN community

The image you linked to is “access denied”

Software equivalent of a supernova, if you squint.

Agreed. Their competitor using a different model, Craiyon (https://www.craiyon.com/) just has a webpage with a box you type into to get started.

here is the imnage -> https://ibb.co/0KLRScn

User Manual is over here https://github.com/midjourney/docs/blob/main/user-manual.md#...

I never saw this is kinda staff. May be its future.

A web-based alternative https://accomplice.ai/

Where are the mind-blowing images?

I found a couple here: https://github.com/midjourney/docs

See the example in this screen shoot https://snipboard.io/OSq4uG.jpg

You will find it here https://www.midjourney.com/pub/feed/

Doesn't seem to work. Can you open that link in a private window?

The content is inside their Discord.

And then I try the same prompt that produced the tree and get this nightmare:

https://imgz.org/iBFpCWiG/

is there any content on this website related to the submitted title?

or just recruitment "we're hiring" spam? impressive advisors, but that's it

Just do Sign in with discord and you will see whats people are making ...

Couldn't use the site, the animation blocked everything :/

You need to connect discord to make it happent

> You need to connect discord to make it happen

Can you add a telegram option?

Its not possible in telegram, only works in discord. BTW I am not owner ..

In the app, you type in some words -> bot generates you 4 images to choose, upscale, and have other people vote on. So in a way, leveraging the human feedback to see which image people prefer given the initial word input.

On the whole access with discord thing, and objectively going through it:

  * It's a great way to harvest emails and profiles, similar to using facebook login - but it already has a natural filter to noise.  For example, the crypto/NFT space is very on discord.
  * Being able to use humans to generate these images is a great way to get better resolution on what would be a good NFT signal generator...
  * The way discord works, it's easier to collect user metrics vs. website & google analytics.  Every time the server gets overloaded, you know you hit a user threshold and expand.  Pretty smart way of onboarding also -- there are "newbie" chat rooms, free trial chat rooms, and I assume paid chat rooms.  No need to build it since using the chatrooms does it for you!

If I was an artist, I'd be really scared right now.

I'm less than enthused about all these products. Are the results impressive? Very. But it's to the point where they're making a lot of creative endeavors financially worthless, which is eventually going to mean fewer and fewer people develop any of those skills.

Cornucopians naturally point to all the many new possibilities and argue that this is a net benefit for humanity, but in general people make such arguments about things they perceive as a net benefit for themselves; with huge ML models you get text, art, music or whatever manufactured on demand, and you get to feel creative in the sense of museum and gallery curators being adjacent to historical or artistic items. The problem is that you can feel like this all day, but you won't be any more able to perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis.

It's very 'don't ask questions, just consume product and get excited for next product.'

> The problem is that you can feel like this all day, but you won't be any more able to perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis.

All tools are prostheses. Mastery of a tool incorporates it into your proprioception. Do you think about the motions your fingers need to make, when you type? No, of course not - you think about the words you are writing, and they appear. AI tools will be the same, once we get used to them; we will be able to think about the things we are creating at a higher level of abstraction.

Once upon a time there were workrooms full of skilled artisans who spent their days copying books by hand. Along came movable type, and that creative endeavor became financially worthless. Today practically nobody has those skills. A loss? Yes... but do we care? Not really; we'd rather let the 'mechanical prosthesis' of the printing press handle what now seems to us to be the rote work of book production.

You completely missed the point, and ended up equating creative innovation with manufacturing.

Most copyists were not illuminators. Typing does not preclude other forms of writing (eg with a pencil, which I use almost as much as a keyboard), and typing is not a creative endeavor to begin with, unless you want to get into ASCII art.

There's a difference between generative and the merely productive. You could spend 10 years using AI picture generators, and it will not develop your ability to draw a picture on paper. Making selections as a consumer is not the same as creating something, for the same reason that food appreciators in a recent aren't halfway to being chefs.

I understood your point to be a concern that skills we value today will become marginalized or lost if the majority of people choose the new automated tools instead of doing it 'by hand'. You worry that people will just consume output, instead of engaging in creative expression. Did I misunderstand?

My point was that it does not matter whether you can "perform absent the aid of a digital prosthesis", because digital tools are not fundamentally different than any of the other kinds of tools humans have developed throughout our history. Creativity is always a function of the tools available. Creative thought is always shaped and enabled by the capabilities one can draw on. Different skills come and go as they are needed.

When the camera came along, the art of representational painting and illustration lost the importance it previously had. Why hire someone to spend hours making a picture when the camera can do it better, quicker, and cheaper? But of course painting and drawing did not go away, they just evolved into something else. Meanwhile a whole new creative form developed on top of the new technology of photography.

A different analogy: once upon a time, making music involved years of practice, learning to play an instrument, understanding how music works, memorizing compositions. Then records came along... and a few decades later, someone invented DJing. Is a DJ a musician? Not in the traditional way, they're just playing recordings of other musicians after all! But a whole new art form developed at a higher level of abstraction, looping and mixing recordings into a seamless performance.

I believe the same will happen with tools like DALL-E and midjourney. Some creative practices will diminish, because the robots will be good enough, and it won't make sense to have humans do those jobs anymore. But those skills won't disappear; they'll just become specialized, and people will find new strange creative things to do with them. Meanwhile whole new kinds of creative expression will emerge on top of the new AI tools. They won't look like the skills we value today, but people won't stop making creative use of their environments, so they will eventually become new disciplines as well-developed as anything we have today.

Nah! https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1003491515068321913/1...

Prompt was omniman vs homelander vs superman

It's not perfect but the pace of progress in art generation technology is crazy to me. Nice username by the way.

Maybe there is not enough existing Omniman/Homelander imagery to draw from.

A human artist needs only one.

"Sign in with Discord".

No, thanks.

If you tie yourself to Discord, or other social media platforms, then I'm out.

And that's ok. I had the same reaction, but after jumping in I made two realization:

- this is just like slack, and I already use and don't mind slack

- after using Dall-E's webinterface for 3+ months, I actually like the image generation interaction via chat, its history transfers seamlessly between my devices, social feedback is built right in etc.

The coolest thing about this is seeing the images generated in almost real time. The bot will generate blobs of colors and then iterate to generate more and more details. Very fun to just watch the various feeds.

Yeah, you can choose the version, upscale it and enhance it also

Just let the chat scroll down and you’ll have a free art exhibition. I wonder if there is a way to do this on full screen. Would make a nice (although bandwidth hungry) screensaver of sorts.

Also this AI idea of anime style is more akin to a Tony Diterlizzi style than actual anime/manga.

Lots of words and statements are censored on midjourney too. The title is kind of incorrect.

Impressive, but mind still intact.

r/midjourney on Reddit to see examples without needing Discord.

What's new or different from existing models like Dall-E?

The beta was easier to get into before Dall-E opened up more, and it can be more interesting for generating weird science fiction or fantasy environments.

Are there any details on how this works anywhere? It kinda looks like a diffusion model, but using Gaussian blur instead of the Gaussian noise that dall-e etc use.

Need to find out ..

“Sign in with discord” = “We’re not serious about anything, come back later when we actually want people to use this”

Discord is a cancerous black hole on the internet.