AI Midjourney v5 imager wows with photorealistic images and 5-fingered hands News-thread

Wednesday, half of the trip Announced version 5 of its commercial AI image synthesis service, which can produce photorealistic images at a level of quality some AI art fans call creepy and “too perfect.” Midjourney v5 is now available as an alpha test for customers who subscribe to the Midjourney service, which is available via Discord.

“MJ v5 currently looks to me like I finally got glasses after ignoring poor eyesight for too long,” said Julie Wieland, a graphic designer who often shares his Midjourney creations on Twitter. “Suddenly you see everything in 4k, he feels strangely overwhelming but also incredible.”

Wieland shared some of his Midjourney v5 builds with Ars Technica (seen in a gallery below and in the main image above), and they certainly show a progression in image detail since Midjourney first arrived in March 2022. Version 3 debuted in August and Version 4 debuted in November. Each iteration added more detail to the generated results, as our experiments show:

Midjourney works similarly to image synthesizers like Stable Diffusion and DALL-E in that it generates images based on text descriptions called “cues” using an AI model trained on millions of human-made works of art. Midjourney was recently at the center of a copyright controversy regarding a comic that used older versions of the service.

After experimenting with v5 for a day, Wieland noted improvements including “incredibly realistic” skin textures and facial features; more realistic or cinematic lighting; better reflections, highlights and shadows; more expressive angles or overviews of a scene, and “eyes that are nearly perfect and no longer lopsided.”

And of course the hands.

Over the past year, the idea that AI art generators can’t render hands correctly has become something of a culture trope. In particular, Midjourney v5 can render realistic human hands quite well. “Hands are correct most of the time, with 5 fingers instead of 7-10 on one hand,” Wieland said.

In the service’s Discord release notes, Midjourney also noted that v5 is now responsive with a “much wider stylistic range” than version 4, while also being more responsive to prompts, generating less spam, and offering a 2x increase in image resolution.

If there’s a visual downside to the Midjourney update for fans of AI art, perhaps it comes from visuals that can be so realistic and “perfect” that model accuracy takes away some of the excitement of repeatedly generating AI images to find. a suitable result, what one might call a “slot machine effect”. Although a Twitter user named Philipp Lenssen noted“If you have a specific image theme in mind, it’s still a bit like the lottery. But with a higher chance of winning than v4.”