SO, one of my favorite characters is Porsche, a centauress warrior from the thirty-first century who populated many of my first tranche of as-yet-unpublished science fiction stories. (I think she only appears in one published story, “Stranded” in the anthology of the same name, and even that, just as a cameo). And while I have worked a lot to improve my art, I wondered what Midjourney could do. And I got the above result from the following prompt:
a centauress with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and bearing a double-bladed scythe with black glowing blades
– the Centaur
Wow. This is really spot on. Her hair is right, her face is right, her skin tone is right, her armor is right … heck, even her slightly haunted look is right, and to go beyond even that, one of the variants looks like a slightly older, more grizzled variant, which completely checks out with her storyline:
Kudos to you, Midjourney, except … she’s not a centauress. She’s just a person, a fetching one, I admit, but not a half-woman, half-horse creature with the pointed ears and black twin-bladed scythe of the prompt.
Well, shoot. What if we look at some of the other variants?
This one is creepily good in a sense … it’s got her forehead dot (she’s a First Contact Engineer, and wears a pheromone bead she used to communicate with a scent-based alien hive species) and even hints of her mechanical arm and possibly ear. But this is just coincidence. Look at this other variant:
What appears is just chance. Here, her ears are rounded, the dot’s gone, and the weapon looks even less on point. A lot of what looked right to me is just random features onto which I was projecting, like cloudbusting.
Well, double shoot. What if we refine the prompt? What do we get?
a centauress (a creature with the upper body of a woman and a lower body of a horse) with long, rich curly purple hair, very beautiful, with half-asian, half-english appearance, and pointed ears, wearing an armored space costume like a combination of ghost in the shell and star trek, and wielding a scythe with black glowing blades
– the Centaur
Yerk. That’s … just jumbled nonsense. Tweaks to the prompt to make it simpler just produced women on horses. Midjourney does not apparently understand the concept ‘centaur’ in any meaningful sense. I tried just the prompt “centaur”, and … um … yeah … no, I’m not going to show you those. They’re just a guy with a horse, or sort of on a horse, or … sort of … in a horse? A centaur as envisioned by The Thing.
Okay, one last try. What if I give it one of my pieces of art, and then ask it to render it anime style? Let’s hold that piece of imagery till the last, but the prompt is:
an anime style centauress with purple hair and a double-bladed scythe jumping in front of a waterfall
–the Centaur
Oh, lordy. And I’m not going to show you the one it tried to generate from the prompt “anime style”.
Oh wait, I am!
Wow. Evocative – the top left reminds me of Cinnamon Frost – but it has little to do with the image I put in, and the attempt in the top right especially is nonsensical.
I am inspired by Midjourney. It’s definitely a better renderer than me, and has good ideas about composition which I have already used in my artwork.
But I stick by my comment that it is an amateur which has taught itself to render very well, and cannot take meaningful art direction. As limited as I am, I’ll stick with my own drawing, thank you!
Like this one, the image I gave to Midjourney above. It’s not perfect, it’s not well rendered … but it is mine:
And she has four legs, a scythe, and pointy ears, dag nabit.
-the Centaur
