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

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

“MJ v5 at present feels to me like lastly getting glasses after ignoring unhealthy eyesight for somewhat bit too lengthy,” mentioned Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares her Midjourney creations on Twitter. “All of a sudden you see the whole lot in 4k, it feels weirdly overwhelming but additionally superb.”

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

Midjourney works equally to picture synthesizers like Secure Diffusion and DALL-E in that it generates photos primarily based on textual content descriptions referred to as “prompts” utilizing an AI mannequin skilled on tens of 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 e book that used earlier variations of the service.

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

And, in fact, the arms.

Over the previous 12 months, the concept that AI artwork turbines cannot render arms accurately has change into one thing of a cultural trope. Notably, Midjourney v5 can generate lifelike human arms pretty effectively. “Arms are right more often than not, with 5 fingers as a substitute 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 photos that may be so lifelike and “excellent” that the mannequin’s precision takes away a few of the thrill of repeatedly producing AI imagery to discover a appropriate end result, what one would possibly name a “slot machine impact.” Though one Twitter person named Philipp Lenssen noted, “You probably have a selected picture topic in thoughts, it is nonetheless a bit like lottery. However with increased profitable probabilities than v4.”