Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.
If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.
[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
You’re definitely on to something, people wouldn’t criticize as much as they are otherwise, they’d ignore it.
I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
Just fucking by canvas, brushes and good quality oil paint. You need only five colours[1]. Cost you maybe 50-80 euros. And any mess you produce will give you more joy thanand shot produced by any clanker brain. Keep at it for few years, take evening classrs, look tutorials and you have learned yourself a skill. You can now travel to any majos art museum across the world and have a discussion with masters through their works hanging on the wall.
And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.
The author is using special prompts exploiting flaws of the old models, and doesn't like that new models interpret the hacks literally instead.
The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish
what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
While I don’t disagree with the author, these are simply two completely different tools with different use cases. Nano Banana Pro throws out fantastic images you can actually use in your marketing right away. It’s not an art tool - it’s a business tool
As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
Another word for coarse is impasto technique, where the paint is so thick the painting-knife or brush strokes are visible and leave a pronounced texture (e.g. Van Gogh, Rembrandt).
Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.
AI doesn’t make art. The
OP is trying to fit the square peg of their intuitive understanding about the art creation process into the round hole of generating it via AI
I don’t see splashes of primary color as more artistic. Anyway, what if you just ask it “more coarse”? I see impressive depth in the latest outputs, but as with all technically proficient performers, you might just have to consciously scale it back.
The author claims the old models are better at creating art than the new ones. I disagree; art requires consciousness and intent while this type of model is capable of neither.
I'm pretty sure people have created images via random physical processes, then selected the best ones, and people have called it "art." That's no different than cherry picking AI generated images that resonate. The only difference is the anti-generative AI crusade being spearheaded by gatekeepers who want to keep their technical skills scarce in their own interests.
I define art as something that evokes an emotion or feeling. I’ve seen people wax poetic about the ”meaning” of an imagine only to find out that the image was created synthetically.
Yes. The Earth and its formations are art. I disagree that art requires consciousness and intent, but those admittedly do improve its value [to me]. (For reference, I value AI content/art poorly and avoid it)
We have at least established that very boring pieces, such as Andy Warhol's Empire, Kazimir Malevich's White on White, and John Cage's As Slow As Possible, are not art.
As can a photo of one (sorry, I don't have a good example of that).
And, both a camera and AI are an example of "using a tool to create an image of something". Both involve a creator to determine what picture is created; but the tool is central/crucial to the creation.
When I was about 12 a car crashed in my quiet street (somebody tried to drive it through a concrete fence), so the next day I sat in the street and did an ink drawing of it with a mapping pen nib. That was excellent art. Then I stole one of the gigantic suspension springs and took it home to use as a stool, which by some silly definitions was also an act of art. But this all evades the original question about whether the actual car crash is art for evoking feelings, or whether art in fact must involve pictures, or human communication, or what. It's one of the impossible definitions, along with "intelligence" and "freedom". I'm a fan of "I know it when I see it".
The author has succeeded only in arguing one meaningless image factory produces images they find more aesthetically pleasing than another meaningless image factory.
The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.
Well, birthdays are merely symbolic of how another year's gone by and how little we've grown. No matter how desperate we are that someday a better self will emerge, with each flicker of the candles on the cake we know it's not to be. That for the rest of our sad, wretched, pathetic lives, this is who we are to the bitter end. Inevitably, irrevocably. Happy birthday? No such thing.
> Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?
Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.
Is art then just the outcome? The artifact that was produced?
What's your criteria then for who is allowed to produce art? If allowing everyone to create it lessens its value such that it becomes worthless, there must be a cutoff.
If your goal is to ensure the continuity of human expression, limiting who is allowed to create art and narrowly defining art to great works kind of misses the point.
Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.
If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.
[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7F67FsLaaY
The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
> A painting sold at Sotheby's
and
> A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's
convey very different meaning (to me).
As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.
Were those “feelings” not authentic?
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4329570102/crash-impact-car-can...
As can a photo of one (sorry, I don't have a good example of that).
And, both a camera and AI are an example of "using a tool to create an image of something". Both involve a creator to determine what picture is created; but the tool is central/crucial to the creation.
The framing implies they understand little of art at all; beyond gurgling and clapping like a child at the colors and shapes they find most stimulating.
Is true art a hermetic endeavour which must be gate-kept to seal out the lesser folk?
If so, then why lambast the lesser folk over their ignorance of the secret knowledge?
Kind of. If everyone on the planet can paint the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, then it’s not anything special anymore is it? Especially if it reduces the process to asking the world’s most prolific counterfeit machine to do it for you.
What's your criteria then for who is allowed to produce art? If allowing everyone to create it lessens its value such that it becomes worthless, there must be a cutoff.
If your goal is to ensure the continuity of human expression, limiting who is allowed to create art and narrowly defining art to great works kind of misses the point.