Midjourney

The company has been working on improving its algorithms, releasing new model versions every few months. Version 2 of their algorithm was launched in April 2022[9] and version 3 on July 25.[10] On November 5, 2022, the alpha iteration of version 4 was released to users[11][12] and on March 15, 2023, the alpha iteration of version 5 was released.[13] The 5.1 model is more 'opinionated' than version 5, applying more of its own stylization to images, while the 5.1 RAW model adds improvement while working better with more literal prompts.

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Fake images involving personalities and created with Midjourney become viral (March 2023) : President Macron collecting rubbish, Donald Trump stopped by police officers, the Pope dressed in a white down jacket....[20]

The program was used by the British magazine The Economist to create the front cover for an issue in June 2022.[21][22] In Italy, the leading newspaper Corriere della Sera published a comic created with Midjourney by writer Vanni Santoni in August 2022.[23] Charlie Warzel used Midjourney to generate two images of Alex Jones for Warzel's newsletter in The Atlantic. The use of an AI-generated cover was criticised by people who felt it was taking jobs from artists. Warzel called his action a "mistake" in an article about his decision to use generated images.[24] Last Week Tonight with John Oliver included a 10-minute segment on Midjourney in an episode broadcast in August 2022.[25][26]

A Midjourney image called Théâtre d'Opéra Spatial won first place in the digital art competition at the 2022 Colorado State Fair. Jason Allen, who wrote the prompt that led Midjourney to generate the image, printed the image onto a canvas and entered it into the competition using the name "Jason M. Allen via Midjourney". Other digital artists were upset by the news.[17] Allen was unapologetic, insisting that he followed the competition's rules. The two category judges were unaware that Midjourney used AI to generate images, although they later said that had they known this, they would have awarded Allen the top prize anyway.[27]

In December 2022, Midjourney was used to create the images in an AI-generated children's book in the span of a weekend. Titled Alice and Sparkle, the book features a young girl who builds a robot that becomes self-aware. The creator, Ammaar Reeshi, spent hours tweaking Midjourney prompts, rejecting hundreds of generated results to ultimately choose 13 illustrations for the book.[28] Both the product and process drew criticism: “the main problem... is that it was trained off of artists’ work. It’s our creations, our distinct styles that we created, that we did not consent to being used," one artist wrote.[29]

In March 2023, the CEO David Holz stated that Midjourney has blocked the generation of images of Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the People's Republic of China, in order to prevent the Chinese government from potentially censoring Midjourney completely over satirical images of Xi. Holz said that "the ability for people in China to use this tech is more important than your ability to generate satire."[30][31]