Since its release of v4, I’ve been an avid user of Midjourney, one of the currently most popular image generation tools aside from DALL-E and wombo.art. The current popularity of AI image generation tools has created quite an uproar among artist community, who fear for their livelihood. Personally, I think AI is a fantastic tool, that can help artists generate new ideas and improve existing art.

Midjourney can create fantastic images, especially in the context of fantasy settings, and I’ve been using it primarily to create images for our Dungeons & Dragons campaign, such as images of the player characters in our party. And here is where my troubles begin – Midjourney cannot create my character correctly, no matter what I try, which is because my character is a centaur. May I present to you some of my numerous attempts at creating a female centaur, a human horse blend, half woman half horse, etc, some of which are rather disturbing…

Fantasy creatures are generally a problem, and aside from centaurs, I’ve also had troubles making images of cerberus, gygans, sphinxes, you name it. As for the portrait of my DnD character, I ended up settling for just a portrait – the rest of the centaur body, you’ll have to imagine yourself1.

One thing that I’ve noticed with Midjourney is that it defaults to extremely beautiful young women, with immensely exaggerated features – but the same is true for male characters. Compare these pictures; the rightmost square of 4 pictures was simply a spiral staircase, eerie and mysterious – why is there a girl there? The 8 pictures in the middle were prompts for a beautiful angel / beautiful forest nymph, while the rightmost were for a young titan, empyrean, in which I didn’t even define him to be shirtless, but somehow Midjourney seems to think that he needs to be extremely muscular.

Well, obviously Midjourney is being fed with images by a horde of horny teenagers, creating very odd standards for this AI. Which is funny, because if you’ve used Midjourney a little bit, you might have encountered it’s ridiculously exaggerated censorship already. The amount of words that are banned from prompts is becoming a bit of an issue sometimes (e.g. “voluminous”, “girth”, or simply “sexy”).

However, another big issue that AIs like Midjourney are facing is that they’re very racist. Midjourney defaults to beautiful blonde women, which I noticed when I tried to prompt simply for doctor who companion martha. Martha was the first black companion alongside the Tenth Doctor. Well, according to Midjourney she was blonde, and perhaps not even black (4 leftmost squares). Once I added the name of the actress (Freema Agyeman), the results looked a lot more like actual Martha.

If you’re now wondering what those other, rightmost squares are – out of curiosity, I also tried to prompt for doctor who ncuti gatwa. Ncuti Gatwa is the actor who was hired to be the Fifteenth Doctor with the return of Russell T. Davies to the show, and according to Midjourney, he might be a cat, an alien, or perhaps a woman. Well, at least we might be able to agree that the Doctor is, in fact, an alien.

Despite all its faults, I still think Midjourney is a fantastic tool for creative people. I’ve used it myself to generate new ideas for paintings. Midjourney can also use images as references, so I fed it an image of a painting that I painted a few years ago, and it generated me lots of interesting new variations of this. I ended up using one of Midjourney’s outputs as a basis for a new painting, which while it doesn’t look quite as good as Midjourney’s version, is now decorating my apartment.

While I sympathize with artists who are now fearing for their income, I honestly do not think that AI tools like Midjourney will replace them. The art generated by such tools is fun to play around with and can be great for generating ideas, but I imagine that in a professional setting, it still makes a lot more sense to hire an actual artist who knows what they’re doing2. AI art is great for people who don’t want, need or who cannot afford professional artists – such as for example in the context of D&D, for which I believe it’s a really great tool. One day, it might even be able to make me a proper centaur wizard 😉