How to actually use midjourney or AI art?

Right now, people are just playing with the tech and making crazy things. But it already works very well to just manifest the thing you need: a single, simple picture of whatever. Better than stock. Better than a lot of artists. Much faster and cheaper (not to mention, more unique and more creative). AI art is a threat to humanity, no doubt, and will cause massive shifts to everything. But it’s such a powerful productivity tool, it’s pretty hard to ignore, even for designers or artists.

It’s not meant for art, real art. It is pretty great for commercial graphics. Like when I need a dark desktop background, or a whisp of purple smoke, or a floor of pink diamonds… specific, human ideas and concepts I can bring together for a project. It’s a lot faster than photobashing in photoshop (or searching for overused stock resources) and the results are better.

I’m mostly interested in using midjourney for book cover design, but it’s still a little too early for that; although usually if I give clients the options, they’ll choose the most powerful cover, regardless of how it was made. I planned to use it for my DIY templates, as example art that should not be used… but I also discovered some prompts that are too good to share, that end up with a print-ready, highly commercial book cover art, and I selfishly don’t want to tell people about them until I have a chance to update my own covers, because I want to use the tech to my advantage while I have a chance – but it’s a slipping window. It took hundreds of hours to discover my prompts, but I’ll bet people will be able to get similar or better results with new version of midjourney.

For book cover art, I don’t need a million fancy art styles or creative prompts. But it is pretty difficult, to get the background, detailed character concept art, and foreground all in one balanced image. The typical style will be near-photographic, with dramatic lighting. I have a tool to blend layers together like photoshop, but in a few months, we may not need it.

*I already found a prompt that makes pretty great book cover art… these work in V4, but in V5 they look tacky, like bad photoshop made from cheesy renders; which is what most authors would end up with unless they hire a designers to photobash everything together into a scene.

It can’t handle text or typography yet, which is where my templates come in handy. But I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets a lot better at typography this year as well, which would be another major assault on sites that sells design resources. For example… If could say “add this title in this font”, and it managed it – it wouldn’t be legal to use the font without buying the rights, but it would also be very hard to prove otherwise (fonts are different from art: if you copied one specific piece of art from an artist, that would also be illegal. But imagine if you said, I need a spooky serif font for paranormal romance like these three fonts; to spell out the title… or create a whole new alphabet to use). It would take a lot of work, right now. It will get easy, later. The sites that sell these resources, or the designers who create them, should be worried.

UPDATE; From what I can tell, the next version of Dall-e(3?) can already do text like this, and it looks amazing.

AI art copyright issues and commercial use

Right now, the jury is out… but most of the big players are already on board with AI art and stable diffusion, which means it’s unlikely to go away, even if we add better protections. That said, it’s a little risky to use AI art in commercial products or projects; it’s risky to use it for clients unless they know what they’re signing up for. It’s not illegal – probably – depending on your prompts or subjects, which you do need to be careful about.

But don’t try to pass it off as your artwork or lie about how the art was made.

I mentioned this earlier, but styles can’t be copyrighted. Specific movies, video game characters, brands or celebrities probably are, however. There’s always been “fan art” where artists portray these things, and it’s a gray area, but if you try to sell things it can get illegal (I got a cease and desist once from the makers of “Angry Birds” because of an oil painting I was working on….)

PS – as an art history major, I hope these midjourney prompts will help people learn, explore and admire very talented artists, to get a sense of the various art and photography styles and terms. It can be a great learning exercise. However it’s also dangerous: some of my images, for example, could come up when people search for actual living artists, and that’s no good. It makes the artist’s names more recognizable, but also makes them harder to find. So I encourage you to seek them out and support them if you can.

I’ve talked more about this stuff at length.

• people are starting to win art and writing contests with AI and then create massive drama, when people point this out, the artist lies, it’s a big mess.
• but Photoshop just added an amazing integral tool for generating backgrounds. It’s going to be impossible to ban – and impossible to prove – the use of AI art because it makes things so much easier, even for designers.

more