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

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

“MJ v5 at present feels to me like lastly getting glasses after ignoring dangerous eyesight for just a little bit too lengthy,” mentioned Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who usually 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 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 pictures primarily based on textual content descriptions known as “prompts” utilizing an AI mannequin educated on thousands and thousands 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 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 virtually excellent and never wonky anymore.”

And, in fact, the palms.

Over the previous 12 months, the concept that AI artwork turbines cannot render palms appropriately has grow to be one thing of a cultural trope. Notably, Midjourney v5 can generate real looking human palms pretty effectively. “Palms are appropriate 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 pictures that may be so real looking and “excellent” that the mannequin’s precision takes away among the thrill of repeatedly producing AI imagery to discover a appropriate consequence, what one would possibly name a “slot machine impact.” Though one Twitter consumer named Philipp Lenssen famous, “You probably have a selected picture topic in thoughts, it is nonetheless a bit like lottery. However with greater profitable possibilities than v4.”