Midjourney released its external editor on Thursday, “a powerful new tool to unleash your imagination.” The artificial intelligence tool, available to a select group of users, will allow users to upload their own photos, then adjust them, edit them, and reassemble them in a wide range of artistic styles.
Previously, users could upload a reference image to Midjourney, either through its alpha web app or its Discord server, and then have the generative model use it as a reference to create a new image. However, you could not make any edits to the source image itself. This changes with the new external editor. With it, you’ll be able to add specific assets within the image, edit them, move them, resize them, remove them, and restore them, as well as redesign the whole image in a completely new style – transforming it from a photograph to, for example, a different style like pointillism, impressionism, or anime. The system is said to also work on innovative logo designs and line drawings.
The new tool has not been released to everyone yet. “To maintain the same fairness standards we’ve set across Midjourney,” the company wrote in its announcement blog, it is only available to users who have subscribed to its service for a year or more, or those who have produced 10,000 or more images through the Midjourney platform – essentially, its most loyal customers.
We hope that this policy will prevent a flood of generations that violate copyright rights as we saw with the release of xAI’s Grok 2. Although one user, Haleem Rassa’i, has already advanced in switching models in an image using the external editor, highlighting the fact that it’s almost impossible to control the images created by artificial intelligence.
You will also need to, of course, meet the site’s age requirements, as well as “follow all applicable laws, our community guidelines, and other policies.” The company also reserves the right to remove content at its discretion and warns that “claims that seem innocent may face friction with our fairness – and demands may be filtered out.”
Midjourney founder David Holz also mentioned in a message on the company’s Discord server that “all of these things are very new, and we want to give the community and human moderation staff enough time to handle them gently…”
Users have already started sharing their edited works online, with impressive examples as much as they are concerning. For example, Dreaming Tulpa used it to reshape the Mona Lisa painting in various Gothic styles – and this “Gothic” is as in the Gothic mall at Hot Topic, not the period of artistic and architectural innovation in Europe from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
Midjourney’s new editing feature
Yesterday was the last day where reality could be distinguished from fantasy. I hope you made the most of it! pic.twitter.com/TtPjTn8zjD
— Nearby (@nearchyan) October 23, 2024
On the contrary, another user used it to replace the cake with a set of graphics processing units in an image of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, boasting that “yesterday was the last day where reality could be distinguished from fantasy. I (so-and-so) hope you made the most of it! We still have to see if these overly resource-heavy accounts will lead to anything more than simply distorting classic artworks or generating memes.
Midjourney is certainly not the only artificial intelligence company offering this kind of service. Gemini, ChatGPT (via Dall-E), Grok, and Copilot can also create and edit images in a similar way.
