Tag: Artificial Intelligence

About Midjourney

Midjourney is an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species.

Midjourney is the industry standard in image generation. It has 14+ million users. Interesting, but typical of the tech industry, 80% of the users are male and 20% are female. MJ is NOT a corporation. It is a research lab, created to make community art by a founder who is not after money. He already has enough. They do not have any financial investors and do not want any. MJ is not cheap to use because of the $100,000 GPU servers that are needed to run millions of requests every second of every day. 90% of MJ fees go into the rental of servers. It’s very expensive to generate images.

Discord is currently the only software in the world that could handle 14 million users that can share creations and talk to each other easily. It has limitations and some UI issues, but it’s the best place for a community… for now. Every Wednesday at 3:00 PM, New York time, for a couple hours, David Holz, the owner and founder of Midjourney holds office hours where users gather to hear about what is next on the horizon and when they can expect the next upgrade. David also answers questions from the audience.

AI Changes Everything

“Whereas previous technological developments altered human behavior and appearances, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence will reshape individuals’ core social and political beliefs, including about the nature and role of the state. The use of autonomous weaponry in war is a case in point.”

“PRINCETON – The rapid march of artificial intelligence is not only disrupting conventional notions of work. It is also changing the essence of human identity. Whereas previous technological developments altered human behavior and appearances, AI will fundamentally reshape individuals’ core social and political beliefs, including about the nature and role of the state”

Read more at Project Syndicate: AI Changes Everything

Paris 1923: Midjourney & Runway


Experiment with images generated in Midjourney v5.2 and image-to-video parts created via Runway Gen 2.

In 1923, Paris was a hub for art and culture. The city attracted renowned artists and writers like Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, along with many others who found inspiration in its lively atmosphere. The charm of Paris had created a mythos of romance that had captivated people from all corners of the world.

Zeroscope, Free Text-to-Video

“Zeroscope stems from Modelscope, a multilevel text-to-video diffusion model with 1.7 billion parameters. It generates video content based on textual descriptions. It refines this concept, offering higher resolution, without the Shutterstock watermark, and closer to a 16:9 aspect ratio. Zeroscope features two components: Zeroscope_v2 567w, designed for rapid content creation in a resolution of 576×320 pixels to explore video concepts. Quality videos can then be upscaled to a “high definition” resolution of 1024×576 using zeroscope_v2 XL.”

Read more at the decoder.com: Zeroscope is a free text-to-video model that runs on modern graphics cards

AI specialist is the new “it” girl

“In contrast to crypto or web3, few people think AI will be a flash in the pan. Just how prevalent it becomes, of course, will depend largely on how profitable business use cases for it are. Already, tech workers are losing jobs to AI, so many figure they might as well get ahead of it and get in on the action. They’re turning to communities on Reddit as well as to friends and colleagues already in the field to find out how they can pivot to lucrative jobs in AI rather than having their jobs replaced by AI.”

Read more at Vox: Scared tech workers are scrambling to reinvent themselves as AI experts

Will AI Ever Be Creative?

“Many people argue AI cannot be creative because humans produced and trained it on their own ideas. But humans also produced and trained Beethoven, Dickinson and Da Vinci. Geniuses don’t spring out of the Earth like Greek gods. Like it or not, everything you’ve ever created was inspired — at least in part — by something another person taught you.”

“Even geographically isolated cultures come up with the same artistic and literary themes over and over again — a great flood, talking animals, people with wings and personified planets. People’s brains are so similar across the board that no matter where they go, they write the same stories and share the same dreams. Just like AI, you’re hardwired to have certain thoughts.”

Read more at Unite.ai: Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Truly Creative?

AI, how does it work?


For many of us, the term artificial intelligence conjures up images of science fiction movies. But what is it really? As AI technology becomes a bigger part of our world, Lester Holt sits down with Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, to talk about how it works.https://dariusdesign.com/wp-admin/edit.php