AI Secrets is your new weekly update on how AI is changing our everyday lives. Our experts will keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week weāre looking at Midjourney - the AI image generator that's a viral sensation.Share this with anyone you want to keep up to date.
Five Is The New Magic Number ā
As any art student will tell you, hands are one of the hardest parts of a human to draw. Itās a challenge that many artists give up on, including the Japanese illustrator Hokusai (famed for his Great Wave off Kanagawa, less well known for waving humans) and Peanuts cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Both preferred to draw their subjects wearing mittens.
Theyāve also been a huge problem for text-to-image generators such as Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. These AIs are capable of creating incredibly detailed photorealistic images, but the realism ends when the mittens come off. Until last week, the hands of AI artists tended to resemble Everything Everywhere All At Onceās Oscar-winning hotdog hands, but always with the wrong number of fingers. Either too many, or too few.
Thatās changed with the release of the latest version of Midjourney v5. Although still inconsistent, Midjourney now seems to understand digital digits far better than previous versions, and routinely serves up plausible human hands with five fingers. The upgrade has also seen significant improvements to image quality and ācoherencyā - the strength of the connection between the text prompt and the resulting image - but these are things that Midjourney v4 was already extremely good at. It couldnāt do hands, and v5 can.
Inevitably, deepfakes have followed. This week Eliot Higgins - a founder of the investigative journalism website Bellingcat - tweeted a series of 50 images created with Midjourney, depicting former President Trump being chased by law enforcement officers, resisting arrest while appalled family members look on, and ultimately being jailed. At the time of writing the most popular of these fakes has had over 5.5m views on Twitter, even though they are extremely crude; Midjourney has mastered hands, but other telltale signs of AI fakery remain. The faces of non-celebrity subjects are blurry and indistinct, so while the deepfake Melania Trump is highly convincing, sheās surrounded by unlikely-looking officers adorned with gibberish logos. One is wearing two hats.
Most of the fakes are better than this, but they still bear obvious hallmarks of their AI origins and are unlikely to fool anyone who is paying attention. Weāre still a long way from a reality composed of perfectly faked images, and as Midjourney improves its algorithms, itās also tightening its defenses against malicious use; the word āarrestedā is now banned from prompts on the service, and so is Eliot Higgins.
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Google has belatedly launched its new AI model, Google Bard, with disclaimers about its competence and reliability. TechCrunch put the new AI through its paces and was not very impressed.
Adobe entered the AI fray with Firefly, its own text-to-image generator service. Firefly has access to Adobeās library of stock images, and this could give it a leg up against its copyright-infringing rivals.
OpenAIās CEO Sam Altman has spoken of how he āfeels awfulā after a ChatGPT bug exposed conversations to unauthorized users, but the firm continues to roll the chatbot out to third-party services.
