AI Art Community Newsletter

Hello!! Welcome to newsletter # 34 🤘 Each week, we deliver news in AI & art + abominations, memes, daily theme champs from Whirl and more…

Midjourney v6 release

Last week, Midjourney released version 6. Add —v 6 to your prompts to try it out. Reception has been super positive. Some are unhappy that the jump in image quality is not as significant as promised. But my take (and most others’) is that it’s significantly better than v5.2. Way more fun.

Among the improvements:

• As Nickfloats notes below, v6 prompt comprehension is out of this world. You can throw tons of details into your prompt and Midjourney will pick them up.

• Write your prompts in plain sentences, no syntactic sugar required.

• Higher diversity in the initial set of four images. Not ethnicity diversity (that is still woeful), but subject matter / style / composition.

• Better text comprehension (not perfect).

Here is a look at Midjourney over the last two years. Version 1 to version 6, using the same prompt: up close portrait, no re-rolls.

Midjourney v6 release reception

A few popular posts from X on the matter…

This review by Mayorking ended up in disappointment. A comment I agree with from Chase Lean states, essentially, “DALL-E 3 is better at following instructions. Midjourney is better at art and aesthetics.”

Whirl: Explore, Top 15

In the Explore section of Whirl, a few posts bubble to the surface each week as “Top 15”. Here are a few from there that struck a chord:

By @gan_gogh

By @crea.i.tive_factory

By @jalopy

Not part of Discord?? Come on down → to discord.

🗞️ AI News

This week’s links powered by: twilight_dreams123, dantenotavailable.

• Midjourney V6 is out and about. An article here about it, in addition to all the info in the first section of this letter.

• Google’s Imagen 2 AI art generator is surprisingly powerful

• Snapchat getting their own AI image generator

• Sneak peek at Leonardo’s Motion (video generator), coming soon

• Stable Diffusion was trained on illegal CSAM material, from the LAION-5B dataset

• People are creating scenes of violent decapitation in Bing’s image generator

Not art, still noteworthy

• NYT sues OpenAI & Microsoft for billions 

• 11 authors join lawsuit against OpenAI

• OpenAI creates “Preparedess Framework” for AI risks

• OpenAI creates deal with Axel Springer (Business Insider, Politico)

• Google Docs, Sheets, etc. has an AI side panel now to make traversing your Drive easier (Duet AI)

• Spotify is adding a “text-to-playlist” feature

• “Doom Calculator” - AI model designed to predict when you die, shows 78% accuracy in Denmark test

Got a link? Just reply or join us in #AI News in Discord.

Whirl 🌀

New Release: 1.17 🎊

In 1.16, we released home screen widgets. They ended up not being a hit haha. But the concept was a good one. So for yesterday’s 1.17, widgets were replaced with your Stats HQ. The high-level rundown of 1.17:

• On home screen, you can see a calendar of your posts for the month, as well as your current, all-time + total stats, and community leaderboards related to all of these values.

• Added much better guards to prevent vote boosting in the daily theme, which have been 100% effective since implementing.

• More infrastructure around prompt lists, like follows and notifications when someone posts an image to your list.

Next up: a quick bug patch this evening, then over the next few days, we’ll get image generation up and running. Hoping to get that released before the clock strikes 12:01am, Jan 1st 2024.

For more release info (including bug fixes), check out “Release Notes” in your app or #new-releases in Discord.

👑 Daily Champs

Daily champs from Whirl this week!

“Sleep” - @dsa157.art

“Christmas“ - @ai_art_trw

“Twins” - @crea.i.tive_factory

“Winter Creatures“ - @weirddream.ai

“Wild West“ - @hamizanhassan

“Masquerade“ - @ai_art_trw

“White & Green” - @g3n3tikdizord3r

X Tips: Film Stock

X is chock full of content for AI artists to learn new tips and styles. Just one today - a great list of film / photography terms.

Weekly Abomination

South Pole Santa…

From @figment_ai via #abominations channel in Discord

Fin

As always, many thanks to the Patron Saint squad: Mischief, Oracular_angel, whitehatgfx, momhugssss, danb3ach, Midjourney.portraits, Mauriciotonon, x0alliecat0X, troplanduniverse, Marcus (formerly catsndogs.ai), dreamingr0b0ts, evelynsaiart, adaaiart, freakydreams.ai. And now 200+ who’ve joined the ranks of Lvl 2 or Patron.

→ Consider supporting!

See you next week 🙂

❤️ - Jackson (connect on LinkedIn, if you’d lik