A Journey Into Midjourney

An airship by Midjourney - perhaps for Shipwrights of Marino?

For the last few weeks I’ve been exploring Midjourney AI, a subscription-based art generator. 

Midjourney is pretty fantastic. You can go down some rabbit holes trying to get exactly the result you want. You feed it a simple prompt, maybe an artist or two to emulate, and it spits out a nightmarish guess at what that might look like. 

Like all artists, Midjourney steals, but it also creates. Everything it makes is somehow derivative and original at the same time. Sometimes this is accomplished through dynamic lighting and composition, and sometimes by giving someone three stubby arms and a potato salad for a face.

“Men playing cards” - also melting, apparently

A New Style of Art

I’ve been using clip art in my games forever. Just take a look. But there’s always the risk that the same art is also in a thousand other places. For example, I chose art by Charles Dana Gibson for Witch Trial. It’s gorgeous, despite being about two hundred years out of period. But I know there are dozens of other games that use the exact same images. 

Now with AI, I can have Charles Dana Gibson on staff, as long as I don’t mind that he is tripping balls and thinks everyone’s face looks like a plate of squid ink pasta. I mean, that’s very wrong for him, because his anatomy (and his faces in particular) were amazing. But honestly, it’s still easier to fix one of these nightmares than to start from scratch.

A woman in a train yard, not at all in the style of Charles Dana Gibson

Minor Tweaks

Here are two examples from my in-progress game Coat of Arms. The first image is the raw output from Midjourney, the second is after a few minutes in Photoshop.

The prince’s arm stopped at the elbow, so I just wrapped some cloak around it. Also fixed his face a little, made the cape symmetrical, stuff like that. It’s still odd, but not horrible. And those are pretty minor tweaks to a pretty great composition.

The old man’s face was a landslide, but the raw material gave me the right colors to rearrange and repaint it. I did a similar level of correction to nearly every card in this deck.

As playtest art, this stuff is amazing. It sets the tone for the game, it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it can act as a starting point for any artist who might tackle the final art.

I’ve been fixing art for games for a long time, and this level of work feels the same. One of my biggest early projects was expanding the borders of Brom’s art for Button Men - those images needed a circular outline with a lot of bleed, so with the utmost respect for the originals, I expanded the backgrounds as far as they needed to go. A lot of this patchwork correction feels like more of the same, except there’s no original artist. Well, not really.

Copyright Issues

Midjouney tries its best not to duplicate any existing art, but it does let you ask for a specific artist’s style. This is potentially frustrating for artists who feel as though they have a right to their personal style, and we’ve certainly heard some popular artists complaining about AI taking too much without their permission.

Midjourney’s documentation says it won’t copy indivudual pieces, but it will certaintly copy styles, and I I don’t know how smilar any piece might be to something I’ve never seen. The licensing contract says that the copyright belongs to me, although they also retain publishing rights in their massive online libraries. This means that anything I create with Midjourney can and probably will be stolen, because it’s part of a giant soup of pictures on their servers.

So, I shrug, because I’ve been on both sides of this argument before.

It does raise interesting questions, but for the most part I think it’s hard to believe that an artist can own a style. I was part of a similar debate in the world of juggling in the early 90’s, and you can guess what side I took then.

Contact Jugglers “in the style of” Pino, Rembrandt, Phil Noto, and Phil Foglio

Ugly Things

Playing to Midjourney’s strengths, I decided to start a project called The Book of Ugly Things. This will be a deck of strange creatures illustrated in a quasi-medieval style. It will be a new, enhanced type of Pairs deck, where each card is different. Here are a few of the cards from the current draft.

Ten ugly things.

In a basic Pairs deck, there are ten identical 10 cards, nine identical 9s, and so on. In a standard rank-and-suit deck, every card is unique, so cards can always be ordered by suit or rank. This makes certain styles of game, like trick-taking, much easier with standard deck than with a Pairs deck.

I’ve made a few Pairs decks from 55 unique images, but in most cases the art is too pricey to allow for this, or it’s simply wrong for the theme of the deck. The Book of Ugly Things will be the first Pairs deck with names on each card, so ties can easily be broken when necessary.

By giving each card a unique name, or number, or some other serializing detail, we can create a new suite of games for the enhanced Pairs deck, that wouldn’t be playable with the original versions.

That’s my real goal with the Deck of Ugly Things, and if it works I’m probably going to make more new Pairs decks with a similar structure. Perhaps with photos from my adventures.

I think I might tackle the Pirate’s Bluff deck next… that deck already has tiebreakers on the cards, but it would sure be nice to have a whole deck of Midjourney pirates, even though they will probably be even uglier than my deck of creatures.

Not Everything is Ugly

To be fair, not every Midjourney face is horrifying. If you let it focus on just one face, it can do pretty well - it’s only when it has to deal with several people at once, or when the face is a small fraction of the image, that it goes completely insane. And there are other apps designed specifically for faces, which have other strengths and weaknesses.

Overall, MIdjourney is a fun toy and it gets better with every update. I encourage you to play with it and see what you think. And shortly I expect a few Crab Fragment games to get a Midjourney makeover, because I just can’t stop playing with it.

It’s a bonsai made of squid. Because of course it is.