Simon Willison's Weblog: midjourney

Learning on the Shop floor

2026-05-11T15:46:36+00:00

Tobias Lütke describes Shopify's internal coding agent tool, River, which operates entirely in public on their Slack:

River does not respond to direct messages. She politely declines and suggests to create a public channel for you and her to start working in. I myself work with river in #tobi_river channel and many followed this pattern. Every conversation is therefore searchable. Anyone at Shopify can jump in. In my own channel, there are over 100 people who, react to threads, add color and add context, pick up the torch, help with the reviews, remind me how rusty I am, and importantly, learn from watching. [...]

As so often with German, there is a word for the kind of environment: Lehrwerkstatt. Literally: A teaching workshop. The whole shop floor is the classroom. You learn by being near the work. Being a constant learner is one of the core values of the firm.

Shopify wants to be a Lehrwerkstatt at scale and River has now gotten us closer to this ideal than ever. It’s osmosis learning, because it does not require a curriculum, a training plan, or a manager. It just requires everyone's work to be visible to the maximum extent possible. Everyone learns from each other.

I'm reminded of how Midjourney spent its first few years with the primary interface being public Discord channels, forcing users to share their prompts and learn from each other's experiments. I continue to believe that the early success of Midjourney was tied to this mechanism, helping to compensate for how weird and finicky text-to-image prompting is.

Tags: ai, slack, generative-ai, llms, midjourney, coding-agents, tobias-lutke

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

2025-06-11T21:20:43+00:00

Disney and Universal Sue AI Company Midjourney for Copyright Infringement

This is a big one. It's very easy to demonstrate that Midjourney will output images of copyright protected characters (like Darth Vader or Yoda) based on a short text prompt.

There are already dozens of copyright lawsuits against AI companies winding through the US court system—including a class action lawsuit visual artists brought against Midjourney in 2023—but this is the first time major Hollywood studios have jumped into the fray.

Here's the lawsuit on Document Cloud - 110 pages, most of which are examples of supposedly infringing images.

Tags: law, ai, generative-ai, midjourney, training-data, ai-ethics

On being listed in the court document as one of the artists whose work was used to train Midjourney, alongside 4,000 of my closest friends

2024-01-16T19:02:51+00:00

On being listed in the court document as one of the artists whose work was used to train Midjourney, alongside 4,000 of my closest friends

Poignant webcomic from Cat and Girl.

I want to make my little thing and put it out in the world and hope that sometimes it means something to somebody else.

Without exploiting anyone.

And without being exploited.

Via Hacker News

Tags: ethics, ai, generative-ai, midjourney, text-to-image, ai-ethics

Midjourney 5.1

2023-05-04T15:42:25+00:00

Midjourney released version 5.1 of their image generation model on Tuesday. Here's their announcement on Twitter - if you have a Discord account there's a more detailed Discord announcement here.

They claim that "V5.1 is more opinionated (like V4) and is MUCH easier to use with short prompts" - in comparison to v5.

Last night (9:30pm PST on Wednesday May 3rd) they switched 5.1 to be the default - previously you had to add --v 5.1 to a prompt in order to use it.

To compare the v5 and v5.1 models, I ran the prompt pelicans having a tea party through them both.

Midjourney v5

v5 is the version of Midjourney that came out on March 15th, and really felt like a turning point in that it was the first to reliably produce photorealistic images. If you've seen the flurry of memes of the Pope in a Balenciaga puffy jacket, you've seen Midjourney 5.

Midjourney v5.1

I find the difference between the two so interesting. The v5 one went for photo-realism - the pelicans are in a natural setting, and while they are standing near a tea service none of them are really interacting with it beyond looking at it.

For 5.1, the model seems to have made very different choices. These pelicans are in a formal setting - a tea room, albeit in some with an oil painting of the ocean behind them. The style is more illustrative than photographic, and definitely more whimsical. They're interacting with the tea - which means the model as added creepy little hands in three cases and in one case given them pink claws, albeit in addition to their existing wings.

I think 5.1 does a better job with this admittedly vague and silly prompt.

I use Midjourney pretty regularly now, exclusively for entertainment. It's a lot of fun.

Tags: ai, generative-ai, midjourney, text-to-image

Creating desktop backgrounds using Midjourney

2023-04-10T23:36:14+00:00

TIL: Creating desktop backgrounds using Midjourney

Tags: midjourney

Quoting Jim Fan

2023-04-05T04:45:03+00:00

My guess is that MidJourney has been doing a massive-scale reinforcement learning from human feedback ("RLHF") - possibly the largest ever for text-to-image.

When human users choose to upscale an image, it's because they prefer it over the alternatives. It'd be a huge waste not to use this as a reward signal - cheap to collect, and exactly aligned with what your user base wants.

The more users you have, the better RLHF you can do. And then the more users you gain.

— Jim Fan

Tags: ai, generative-ai, midjourney, text-to-image

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night

2023-03-27T03:17:23+00:00

I lost everything that made me love my job through Midjourney over night

A poster on r/blender describes how their job creating graphics for mobile games has switched from creating 3D models for rendering 2D art to prompting Midjourney v5 and cleaning up the results in Photoshop. “I am now able to create, rig and animate a character thats spit out from MJ in 2-3 days. Before, it took us several weeks in 3D. [...] I always was very sure I wouldn’t lose my job, because I produce slightly better quality. This advantage is gone, and so is my hope for using my own creative energy to create.”

Tags: ethics, game-design, ai, generative-ai, midjourney, text-to-image, ai-ethics

Quoting Charlie Warzel

2022-09-04T21:06:21+00:00

For these reasons, I don’t think I’ll be using Midjourney or any similar tool to illustrate my newsletter going forward (an exception would be if I were writing about the technology at a later date and wanted to show examples). Even though the job wouldn’t go to a different, deserving, human artist, I think the optics are shitty, and I do worry about having any role in helping to set any kind of precedent in this direction.

— Charlie Warzel

Tags: ethics, ai, generative-ai, midjourney, text-to-image, ai-ethics