Midjourney is optimized for beautiful images, while Nano Banana is optimized for better prompt adherence and (more importantly) image editing. It should be obvious for anyone who spent 20 minutes trying out these models.
If your goal is to replace human designers with cheaper options[0], Nano Banana / ChatGPT is indefinitely more useful than Midjourney. I'd argue Midjourney is completely useless except for social media clout or making concept art for experienced designers.
[0]: A hideous goal, I know. But we shouldn't sugarcoat it: this is what underpin the whole AI scheme now.
> In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the [Luddite] movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.
https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/rage-against-the-machine
Whether or not it comes to fruition, it's making large portions of society feel uneasy, and not just programmers, or artists, or teachers.
Like, you know... creating art.
There's the concept, and then there's the painting.
AI slop from a generic prompt is not the same as "using AI to get my concept in physical form faster."
Imagine, for example, a one-man animated movie. But, like, with a huge amount of work put into good, artistic, key-frames; what would previously have been a manga. That's possible, soon, and I think that's huge and actual art.
Are you really complaining that ", from the British Museum." leads to it a painting in the actual British Museum? Just remove the sentence, and you'll be fine. Now good luck trying to make Midjourney place the image at the museum!
I'm a paying MJ user and am impressed by Nano Banana. They're different models. They each serve their purpose.
This analysis is just noise. Yawn.
Ironically, even an LLM with its fake reasoning capabilities can point out the issue with the prompts if you ask it to critique this article.
Eg instead of focusing on the artist, it focuses on the location
This makes sense! I imagine it was trained in some sort of rlvr like way where you give it a prompt and then interrogate "does this image ..." (where each question examines a different aspect of the prompt)
It's obviously an incredible model. I think there's a limit to how useful another article praising it is in contrast with one expressing frustration
I would also welcome someone writing a short takedown where they fix the prompts and get better-than-2022 results from nbp
The new models have prompt adherence precise enough to distinguish what "British Museum" or "auction at Christie's" is from the art itself, instead of blending a bag of words together into a single vector and implicitly copying all of the features of all works containing "museum" or "ArtStation" in their description.
> A painting sold at Sotheby's
and
> A painting in the style of something that would be sold at Sotheby's
convey very different meaning (to me).
> It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
> "By the time a whole technology exists for something it probably isn't the most interesting thing to be doing."
As long as the older tools still exist to make art, I don’t see what the problem is. Use NBP to make your marketing pics, MJv2 for your art
I think the whole point is that in optimizing for instruction following and boring realism we’ve lost what could have been some unique artistic elements of a new medium, but anyway.
This isn't worse - it's different. MJv2 was a happy accident machine. NBP is a precision tool.
If you want the coarse aesthetic, prompt for it: "rough brushstrokes, visible canvas texture, unfinished edges, painterly, loose composition". NBP will give you exactly that because it actually understands what you're asking for.
The real lesson: we're in a transition period where prompting strategies that exploited old model quirks no longer work. That's fine - we just need to adapt our prompting to match what the model was designed to do.
“Herein lies the problem with AI art. Just like with a law school letter of reference generated from three bullet points, the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line's worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that's the only part that carries any communicative freight.”
And you will also see how fucking sad and inferior all these ai images are. Really, trust me, please. There is more to art than this. There is more to life.
Here is an image from NBP with an adapted prompt for Italian futurism: https://imgur.com/a/4pN0I0R
and for Kowloon:
Another cool prompt could be specific painting techniques (e.g. pencil shading, glaze) as if you were training an actual artist in a specific technique.
Were those “feelings” not authentic?
Art that provokes emotion in a cheap or manipulative way is often, if not always, bad art.
https://www.etsy.com/listing/4329570102/crash-impact-car-can...
As can a photo of one (sorry, I don't have a good example of that).
And, both a camera and AI are an example of "using a tool to create an image of something". Both involve a creator to determine what picture is created; but the tool is central/crucial to the creation.
At a certain point, we need to be realistic about the amount of effort involved in artistic creation. Here’s a thought experiment: someone puts two paintings in a photocopier and makes a single sheet of paper with both paintings. Did that person create art? They certainly had the vision to put those two specific paintings together, and they used a tool to create that vision in reality!
It feels like AI art is often just a version of: "I take all the things and mix them! You can't tell which original work that tree is taken from! Tiihiiihi!"
Where "tree" stands for any aspect of arbitrary size. The relationship is not that direct, of course, because all the works gen AI learns from kind of gets mixed in the weights of edges in the ANN. Nevertheless, the output is still some kind of mix of the stuff it learned from, even if it is not necessarily recognizable as such any longer. It is in the nature of how these things work.