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

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

“MJ v5 at present feels to me like lastly getting glasses after ignoring dangerous eyesight for a little bit bit too lengthy,” stated Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares her Midjourney creations on Twitter. “Abruptly you see every part in 4k, it feels weirdly overwhelming but additionally wonderful.”

Wieland shared a few of her Midjourney v5 generations with Ars Technica (seen beneath in a gallery and in the primary picture above), they usually definitely 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 photos based mostly on textual content descriptions referred to as “prompts” utilizing an AI mannequin educated on millions of works of human-made artwork. Not too long ago, Midjourney was on the coronary heart of a copyright controversy relating to a comic book guide that used earlier variations of the service.

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

And, after all, the palms.

Over the previous yr, the concept that AI artwork mills cannot render palms accurately has develop into one thing of a cultural trope. Notably, Midjourney v5 can generate sensible human palms pretty properly. “Arms are right more often than not, with 5 fingers as an alternative of 7-10 on one hand,” stated 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 improve in picture decision.

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