Enlarge / Eight images we generated with the alpha version of Midjourney v4. (credit: Ars Technica)
On Saturday, AI image service Midjourney began alpha testing version 4 (“v4”) of its text-to-image synthesis model, which is available for subscribers on its Discord server. The new model provides more detail than previously available, inspiring some AI artists to remark that v4 almost makes it “too easy” to get high-quality results from simple prompts.
Midjourney opened to the public in March as part of an early wave of AI image synthesis models. It quickly gained a large following due to its distinct style and for being publicly available before DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. Before long, Midjourney-crafted artwork made the news by winning art contests, providing material for potentially historic copyright registrations, and showing up on stock illustration websites (later getting banned).
Over time, Midjourney refined its model with more training, new features, and greater detail. The current default model, known as “v3,” debuted in August. Now, Midjourney v4 is getting put to the test by thousands of members of the service’s Discord server that create images through the Midjourney bot. Users can currently try v4 by appending “–v 4” to their prompts.
