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While I agree mostly ... are the top 20% of that page really any worse than 99.9% of popular existing art? Not Rembrandt, but twitter art posts with 50k likes, or reddit posts with 10k upvotes, or 'local artist' paintings people hang in their homes.
It'd also be very funny to do blind tests on various art fans to see if they can tell the difference between the best MJ outputs and real pieces they haven't seen yet in their favorite genre. I'm certain professionals could still tell, but could 'statue avis' or fans of real anime art?
No, it's not any worse, it's about the same, and that's my point. The midjourney stuff is just as crappy as most of the art that gets made today. The "beauty" that OP thinks he's identified is just hyperpalatablity. Unlike most modern art, the midjorney art is inoffensive, but that doesn't make it good or beautiful.
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Midjourney (and most other AI-gens) still struggle with physics; even with a ton of in-painting and curation. Shadow, perspective and foreshortening, clothing seams, so on, all have often-hard-to-correct mismatches. This guy does some often heroic work to try to counter it, but most prompters (myself especially included!) can't even recognize a lot of the problems without special effort.
ControlNet and depth maps can kinda help (esp if you create a depth map from conventional 3d modeling or photography), but I don't think Midjourney supports that right now. And even when it works this narrows the possibility space down a ton.
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I'd say yes.
The execution is good, the content is totally absent. It is teir 2 wizard van shit, not truth and beauty.
That said, it is Really good as a wizard van panel generator, hot damn.
You'd have to cherrypick particularly cliche scenes that the image models will have an easy time with. But they're cliche precisely because real artists drew a ton of similar images and real people liked them, so it's not that big of a stretch
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Man I have got to get me a wizard van.
Hell yeah brother.
The greatest casualty of the 80's wasn't free love, it was the wizard van.
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