Thursday – May 1, 2025 #38 | Art history majors get the last laugh Thoughts on Midjourney Last weekend I started playing around with Midjourney ($10/mo; there is no longer a free tier). It's been fun because with the tool, I've been able to generate some breathtaking art. I feel like I've also been able to glimpse a vision of the creative future. For the longest time (and I was guilty of this), lots of people dismissed prompt engineering. It just sounded so squishy, overly-flowery, and self-important. Just so totally non-serious, honestly. But after actually using Midjourney, I'm starting to come around. The best prompts I've seen are multi-paragraph with technical vocabulary and referential knowledge. Many folks think prompting is "simply typing words". But that's akin to describing programming as "simply typing words". Words have precise meanings. Words like aperture and focal distance; the difference between soft colors and warm colors; knowing about futurism and brutalism and their aesthetics. You'll be able to maximally leverage MJ if you're fluent with art styles/artists/movements/epochs. Pop-culture knowledge also helps too! (eg. Makoto Shinkai is hugely popular, as is Greg Rutkowski.) Put another way: the closest analogue I can give —again, after having actually played around with MJ now— is that I now think of LLMs as an abstraction layer between human intent and the final product akin to something like Java and Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Back in the initial days of computer programming, people used physical punch cards to express their intent and instructions. Then eventually came Assembly. And now we have high-level languages enormously accessible to just about everyone. The same abstraction tools are now coming for art and creative pursuits. It's poetic all that 15th century esoteric cocktail knowledge that art majors spent tens of thousands of dollars acquiring so many years ago has, now at long last, paid off...
Thu-May 1, 2025
#ScreenshotEssay #38: "Art history majors get the last laugh: Thoughts on Midjourney"
"I now think of LLMs as an abstraction layer between human intent and the final product, akin to something like Java & the Java Virtual Machine (JVM)."
#r2025.05 #r2025 #rl38 #art #ai #midjourney