I played with DALL-E from OpenAI when it first came out.  There are some nice examples on their site but in my experience it’s pretty uneven.

Sure, sometimes you’ll get an astonishing painting that looks really cool…but most of the time, the face will be borked, someone will have three hands, or the software will hilariously misinterpret your intent.

On the other hand, Midjourney seems to consistently produce phenomenal images.

For example, “Tony stark on his laptop getting ready to buy something and smiling mischievously” yielded this:

Not bad at all.  Not sure I’d interpret that as “mischievous” but emotions are notoriously tricky to represent in still art.

Half the fun is playing with various prompts, such as

• “Cyberpunk runic letter for a dystopian maximalist propaganda. High detailed, 8k, monochrome, black and white, minimalism, brutalist architecture”
• “Pixar style german shepherd dog nuzzling up to a smiling teenage girl”
• “superhero taking selfie running from the police, vivid and intense, fisheye lens, 8k”
• “draw a diagram of many different IT components (some cutting edge cyberpunk, some very old steampunk) interacting with each other in complex ways and often failing”

Which yields the following:

Cyberpunk runic letter for a dystopian maximalist propaganda. High detailed, 8k, monochrome, black and white, minimalism, brutalist architecture

Pixar style german shepherd dog nuzzling up to a smiling teenage girl

superhero taking selfie running from the police, vivid and intense, fisheye lens, 8k

draw a diagram of many different IT components (some cutting edge cyberpunk, some very old steampunk) interacting with each other in complex ways and often failing

It’s quite entertaining and once you get going on an imagine, there’s all kinds of ways to refine it and tweak it, or select from the initial images and refine.

The app is Discord-based, and they’ve discontinued their free trial.  However, it’s pretty cheap.  The lowest tier is $10/month.  It’s cheaper if you buy for a year, but…you’re dealing with a company that didn’t exist a year ago so signing up for 12 months might give you pause.  That tier will give you about 3h20m of compute time which is more enough to make thousands of images.

As I said, it’s Discord-based, so after signing up and picking a plan, you log into their Discord and start issuing /imagine commands.  T

Hmm, let’s try this…

“laptop in nature, iceland, iceland, nature, realistic, details, mountains, green grass, blue lake, gray sky, 4k, high resolution, general geographic, fog, , elegant, hyper realistic, super detailed, photography, cinematic, intense, cinematic composition, , beautifully color graded, Unreal Engine, Cinematic, Color Grading, Editorial Photography, Photography, Depth of Field, Tilt Blur, White Balance, 32k, Super – Resolution, Megapixel”

Wow.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.