AI-imager Midjourney v5 stuns with photorealistic pictures—and 5-fingered palms

On Wednesday, Midjourney announced model 5 of its business AI image-synthesis service, which might produce photorealistic pictures at a top quality stage that some AI artwork followers are calling creepy and “too perfect.” Midjourney v5 is on the market now as an alpha check for patrons who subscribe to the Midjourney service, which is on the market by way of Discord.

“MJ v5 at the moment feels to me like lastly getting glasses after ignoring dangerous eyesight for somewhat bit too lengthy,” mentioned Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares her Midjourney creations on Twitter. “Abruptly you see all the pieces in 4k, it feels weirdly overwhelming but in addition superb.”

Wieland shared a few of her Midjourney v5 generations with Ars Technica (seen beneath in a gallery and in the primary picture above), and so they actually present a development in picture element since Midjourney first arrived in March 2022. Model 3 debuted in August, and version 4 debuted in November. Every iteration added extra element to the generated outcomes, as our experiments present:

Midjourney works equally to picture synthesizers like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E in that it generates pictures based mostly on textual content descriptions referred to as “prompts” utilizing an AI mannequin educated on millions of works of human-made artwork. Lately, Midjourney was on the coronary heart of a copyright controversy relating to a comic book ebook that used earlier variations of the service.

After experimenting with v5 for a day, Wieland famous enhancements that embrace “extremely real looking” pores and skin textures and facial options; extra real looking or cinematic lighting; higher reflections, glares, and shadows; extra expressive angles or overviews of a scene, and “eyes which might be nearly good and never wonky anymore.”

And, after all, the palms.

Over the previous yr, the concept AI artwork mills cannot render palms accurately has turn into one thing of a cultural trope. Notably, Midjourney v5 can generate real looking human palms pretty properly. “Fingers are right more often than not, with 5 fingers as an alternative of 7-10 on one hand,” mentioned Wieland.

Within the service’s Discord launch notes, Midjourney additionally famous that v5 now responds with a “a lot wider stylistic vary” than model 4, whereas additionally being extra delicate to prompting, producing much less undesirable textual content, and providing a 2x enhance in picture decision.

If there is a visible draw back to the Midjourney improve for AI artwork followers, it maybe comes from pictures that may be so real looking and “good” that the mannequin’s precision takes away a number of the thrill of repeatedly producing AI imagery to discover a appropriate outcome, what one would possibly name a “slot machine impact.” Though one Twitter consumer named Philipp Lenssen noted, “If in case you have a selected picture topic in thoughts, it is nonetheless a bit like lottery. However with larger successful possibilities than v4.”