{"id":6432,"date":"2023-03-11T22:44:01","date_gmt":"2023-03-12T05:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dresan.com\/blog\/?p=6432"},"modified":"2023-03-11T22:46:40","modified_gmt":"2023-03-12T05:46:40","slug":"forty-nine-minus-twenty-about-that-midjourney","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/11\/forty-nine-minus-twenty-about-that-midjourney\/","title":{"rendered":"[forty-nine] minus twenty: about that midjourney"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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is Porsche, a centauress warrior from the thirty-first century who populated many of my first tranche of as-yet-unpublished science fiction stories.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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

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<\/p>\n– the Centaur<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, shoot. What if we look at some of the other variants?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, double shoot. What if we refine the prompt? What do we get?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

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 <\/p>\n– the Centaur<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

an anime style centauress with purple hair and a double-bladed scythe jumping in front of a waterfall<\/p>\n–the Centaur<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Oh, lordy. And I’m not going to show you the one it tried to generate from the prompt “anime style”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh wait, I am!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like this one, the image I gave to Midjourney above. It’s not perfect, it’s not well rendered … but it is mine:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Porsche<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

And she has four legs, a scythe, and pointy ears, dag nabit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-the Centaur<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226,279],"tags":[15,274,40],"class_list":["post-6432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-artworks","category-dalis-journey","tag-artworks","tag-blogging-every-day","tag-centaurs","ratio-2-1","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6432"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6443,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6432\/revisions\/6443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dresan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}