Cold Creatures: Revisited. Or... Midjourney Again!

So lately my friends in the Vibe Nexus Discord server were raving about how great Midjourney is, and how fun it was to play with personalization, character references, and style references. Well, I used to use Midjourney but gave up on it when it stopped working for me really well. Version 6 just didn't know what I wanted, and Dalle seemed to fill the gap.

But I thought why not pick back up on Midjourney and see what everyone is liking. I decided to experiment with some Cold Creatures, which as you know from this eariler post, was one of the image themes I had the most fun making. Also, please see the banner image, it is also of a Cold Creature.

I tried experimenting with personalization codes, (mine and others) as well as character reference and style reference. Here are the fruits of this labor:

I will say this, so far Midjourney v6.1 and NijiJourney 6 are fun to play with, but when I want a serious image that I have more control over, I will use mage.space's Flux, or LimeWire's Imagen 3.

LimeWire: Yes, You Heard Me!

LimeWire!

Do you remember LimeWire, the file sharing program that everyone downloaded music from in the early 00's? It's back. But not in the way you'd think...

The new LimeWire AI art generator is not from the same company as the old file-sharing LimeWire. The original LimeWire, a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service, was shut down in 2010 due to legal issues. The LimeWire brand was later acquired by a different company, which is now using the name to launch new products, including the AI art generator. This new company has no direct connection to the original developers of the file-sharing service.

That's right, I said AI art generator. It also has an AI assistant (much like ChatGPT, Gemini, or CoPilot), and text-to-music. You can edit your images as well as upscale and inpaint/outpaint. So, with all these features, how does it compare? I will be focusing here on the AI Art generating aspect since that's my specialty, but later at some point, we will go through the text-to-music and the soon-to-come image-to-music feature.

Upon entering the site, you get several options. If you click "Create Image" it takes you to the screen where you enter your prompt. Once you hit "generate" it takes literally 1 to 2 seconds for your image to appear, depending on the options you choose. I'm used to others like Midjourney and DALL-E, which can take upwards of a minute or two if not even more, to generate an image. So this was a welcome surprise.

You can also use negative prompts to provide a nuance to the images you'd like to generate. Each image costs 2.40 credits if you use certain Stable Diffusion Models, 3.00 credits for Google's Imagen, and about 4.50 for Stable Diffusion Ultra, out of 10 free credits given, but there are packages you can purchase for a subscription fee.

For $9.99 a month you get 2000 images and 400 audios. You get access to all models, and no ads, plus more. From there it goes to $29.00 a month for even more features. This first tier is comparable to the paid amount for the basic Midjourney which provides a limited amount of hours for you to generate at $10.00. It is also cheaper than DALL-E which is $20 with ChatGPT pro.  So, I would say this $9.99 is a good deal. Here's why:

The images generate quickly but are fantastic in quality. The prompt adherence is not as good unless using DALL-E 3, (which uses 6.00 credits), but better when you use the prompt adherence slider on some models, and also much better than Midjourney and others. It hardly matters though because you have the ability to tweak your image using some of their features that are available.  You can switch aspect ratios or dimensions, and on some models, you can select your prompt adherence values, as mentioned above. 

LimeWire's Discord server features daily and weekly contests, with the ability to win LMWR currency, which I have a note pinned to look into more for further details. 

I have been testing LimeWire's models, and I will share some of the images below.

All in all, LimeWire is a pleasant surprise. I will be using it a lot more, and hopefully soon will post a review for their audio features, as well! Try it out, I hope you enjoy it. 

http://limewire.com

Independence Day

Happy Birthday America!

We. Are. Doomed. 

Cold Creatures

So today I went a little nuts making these creatures on Dalle that started as creepy little creatures holding glowing hearts in a ruined, smoking city. The gist was "cold creatures, warm heart". In other words don't judge a book by its cover; these creatures were offering warm hearts, despite their visual representation. I kept making these images though, one after another, using a prompt that I pieced together from other older prompts of mine. So the creatures evolved over time and it was no longer a heart they were holding, so I just call this series "Cold Creatures". 

I'm attempting to post some of the images here.

Happy St Patrick's Day

 

That is all for now.

Zoom Zoom Zoom!

 I've been experimenting with the new zoom (outpainting) feature in Midjourney v5.2 and have made some zoom videos. I've been posting them on Instagram but here is one I made for YouTube.

https://youtu.be/bkLDPtGGlfE

Cybernetic Aquarium

 

I made this for my mate who will be 40 on Friday. We are doing an Ice Cream crawl. Should be super fun and great!

New Website

 Ok The new site is up, at http://manikfoxlaughs.art

In other news, I am participating in an ai art tournament and my team is in the 3rd round, there will be 2 more rounds I think. Right now we are neck and neck with another team, so hopefully we pull ahead. It is a lot of fun.

Haven't really tinkered around with music too much the past few weeks, finished one track, that's it. I am going to try to get some sounds out tomorrow. 

Me and my mate always wanted to name our own WNBA basket ball teams, hers would be the Komodo Dragons. I made a logo (above) for it. 

New Website

 I created a website for my music and art:

http://sites.google.com/view/manikfox 

I am thinking of purchasing my own custom domain name. Thinking on it for a week.

Artificial Intelligence

As you probably know by now if you've read any bit of this blog, I am a synthographer. That is what we call an AI Artist. Someone who creates art using artificial intelligence. It all started about a year ago, I think, when I discovered an app called "Dream" by Wombo. It was rudimentary and each prompt I'd type would give me an almost oil-painting brush stroke looking image. I thought it was neat, though, that AI could do that. Then I started using others until I found Wonder and Midjourney. 

I am able to create the wildest dreams in my imagination by typing a description of what I want to see, and then the AI works it's magic and there we go, a rendering of what you wanted (mostly). It still is amazing to me and I've been using it for a while now. 

As with any new technology that seems to explode onto the scene (this particular scene being "the planet"), there are lovers, and there are haters. When photography was in it's infancy, it was scoffed at and not taken seriously, or people feared it would take away from traditional artists who paint on canvas or create sculptures. 

"Those who were excited about photography saw it as a way to capture reality in a way that had never been possible before. They believed that photography could be used to document history, to record important events, and to create art.

Those who were skeptical of photography were concerned about the potential for it to be used for negative purposes. They worried that photography could be used to invade people's privacy, to spread propaganda, or to create false images.

Those who were hostile to photography saw it as a threat to the traditional arts of painting and drawing. They believed that photography was a mechanical art that lacked the creativity and artistry of traditional painting.

Over time, the social opinion of photography has become more positive. Today, photography is widely accepted as a legitimate art form and a valuable tool for documentation and communication."

This is the same for AI art, and AI in general really.

The argument for using AI to create artwork is that it can be used to generate new types of artistic expression that would not be possible through traditional mediums. It can also be used to create unique pieces that are not limited by the skills or physical limitations of the artist. Also, AI can be used to create art that is highly personalized and responsive to the creator, and can be used to explore new forms of interactivity and engagement with the audience. AI-generated art can be used to push the boundaries of what is considered art and challenge our preconceived notions about creativity and authorship. 

AI art can be created using various techniques, such as machine learning algorithms that are trained on large datasets of existing artworks. In this case, the AI may generate new artwork that is similar to or influenced by the art it was trained on. This raises questions about authorship and originality, as the AI may be seen as "copying" the work of other artists.

However, it's important to note that AI is not creating copies of existing artworks, but rather, it's creating new artworks that are influenced by the data it was trained on. The AI is not simply replicating existing works, but rather it's creating new works that are unique and original.

AI-generated art can be seen as a form of remixing or reinterpretation, similar to the way that traditional artists have always been influenced by the work of their predecessors. It can also be seen as a new way of exploring the possibilities of art and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Also, I see people getting confused or arguing about who really creates the art. Is it the AI? Is it the person using the AI? Haters tend to think it's solely the work of the AI that creates, and thus should take ownership of the art. However, without prompting the AI with words, it cannot create a picture, and therefore is more of a symbiotic relationship. 

Right now we are in a grey area of legality for AI; each country has it's own rules for artificial intelligence, or none at all, and it can be tricky navigating the wordiness of any regulations that may be bandied about.

I am aware that AI is here to stay, and you can either choose to embrace it and use it as a powerful tool, or you can put your foot down and stubbornly push against it. The latter was me with cellphones, actually. I didn't have one until 2004, and it was free. I was against cellphones, thinking it was just a fad or were a trendy thing that "everyone had to have" which made me rebel. I got a job at AT&T Wireless (the actual AT&T Wireless, the one that Cingular bought in 2006) in 2004, and they set me up on an employee plan with a phone, and then I realized how convenient and necessary they were.

So my advice to those who have arguements against AI art: Go try it for yourself. Check out Leonardo.AI (http://leonardo.ai) where you can sign up and they give you 150 credits a day as a free user to experiment with. Try it out. Taste it. See what it can do for you. Check out all the potential it has. Don't rub against the grain; you'll only be kicking yourself in the end.

                                            Created by me, using Midjourney

*Artificial Intelligence helped me write this blog entry. 

So, I won a contest...

 I didn't think I would ever win an AI Art contest, but I did. On Discord, in one of my favorite AI channels, I entered a contest and posted an image I made that I thought encompassed the theme of this contest well. Apparently a lot of other people thought so, too. So, I won.

This is good news. Good things have been happening lately that make this a cherry on a cake:

- We finally found a good vet for our cats. This doctor is caring, helpful, knowledgeable, and takes time to really help your animals. The last 4 we brought our old cat to did basically nothing.

- My mate was having serious issues at work with her supervisor, and suddenly they changed her supervisor, she didn't even have to ask. So great! The stress just melted off and she feels so much better. Anxiety sucks.

- I got my 2nd album on Spotify and Apple Music, iTunes, Youtube, TikTok, Instagram, all the places. I never thought in a million years I would be able to get my music out to the world, I was too shy. But finally I did it and even though I am struggling to find listeners, it still is pretty cool.

- And now the contest. I won a gift card from this contest, and am so proud of myself for getting better, and persevering with my prompt writing that I came up with a great image. I'd never before thought my art was good enough. So...Pat on the back. And now it motivates me to do even better than before. My art has gotten better seemingly over the past month, which is cool. I do have a secret prompt that I use for a lot of the work, and it comes out nice. So, I bought a black leather jacket, some fashion jeans, and a pair of shoes. I want to look as cool as I feel right now. :)

 

Old image from August 2022

New image I made, just now.

...

Merry Christmas & Socials

 Merry Christmas Everyone! 

My website "card" if you will, is located at http://clikk.me/manikfox where you can reach me musically and art-illy on Twitter, Instagram, Spotify, and more.

Baby, it's cold outside...

 ...But I've got my love to keep me warm...

So in 3 days it will be Christmas! We had a snowstorm yesterday. It went from being 35-40ºF to now -5. With a windchill of -30º. Yikes!

My favorite time of year though, tied with Halloween and my Birthday :-D

We've got 2 little artificial trees, and decorations up. It looks nice. '

Here's some holiday AI art that I did:

Have a Merry Christmas/Happy Hannukah/Holidays and such to you all!

Ooooo Look What You Made Me Do

In my last post, I explained all about how I am getting into AI art, and how I felt about it. I detailed how I come up with some of the images, and showed some images too. I even gave a short list of engines that I used to generate these images. But I didn't mention... Midjourney.

That's because I hate Discord. It's, as I said below, for the children. But the Midjourney Bot is only on Discord, and I finally broke down and re-downloaded Discord so I could check out Midjourney. And... now I am addicted.

Some say it is easier to come up with that you want from a prompt, I say it is slightly better than the others, when it comes to channeling your creativity properly, but it still has it's hangups. I tried to create pictures of my cats, as an example, and only one out of 4 came out the way I had wanted it to. I had to complete the other 3 using Starryai.

 Midjourney's art even looks different, unless you tell it not to. It will look like a painting. Here is an example:

 

I am enjoying playing around with it, but I'm not going to lose interest in the others that I like to use, either. Also, I am now creating a story using AI art, we'll see how that goes. 

 

AI Got Me

 A few months ago I discovered an app for my phone called "Dream" by Wombo. My eyes were opened to a whole new world of Artificial Intelligence Art. But the art I was generating with Wombo looked like it was a painting, sort of abstract with paintbrush/oil strokes. I began to see different styles popping up around the internet and decided to try different engines. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc... and also using apps like Wonder, Starryai, Nightcafe, Playground.ai, Dawn ai, and many more smaller ones. 

As I began to get more and more interested in it, I started playing with prompts. At first I would choose a pre-loaded style, and type in something like "fox on a bicycle" and see what would happen. Then I started seeing really specific prompts and I loved the result, so what I would do is take parts of other prompts I saw, and add them to my own to see what came out. Now I will say something like, "Red fox on shiny bicycle in the street, medium-shot, golden hour, hyper-detailed, trending on artstation, upscaling, octane render, PS and raw filter." Being very specific with what you're wanting to create, is key. And the more synonyms for an important word that you use, the better chance that word will be represented in your picture. Sometimes you'll put "astronaut with an apple" and ... where's the apple? It isn't there. So I'll put "astronaut with apple, fruit, granny smith, red apple, green apple" (if I didn't care about which color that apple was, of course). 

Since my music persona I created in 2020 is ManiK Fox, I had set up an instagram for UX design using that persona. I never went through with the UX Design thing, so I had an extra Instagram account just sitting there, doing nothing. Now, why not use it for AI Art? Yes. So I have all my work up at instagram, username manikfoxlaughs, if you'd like to take a look. I enjoy participating in daily themed art, from group instagram communities like ai_art_community and others. Each day we vote on a theme, and the next day which ever theme got the most votes, we submit our version of ai art that goes best with that theme. I believe some recent themes have been donut, flower, spider, and now today's is "fear". 

Here's an example of a few of my favorites that I have generated:

It wasn't until just recently I discovered the controversy and backlash against AI. Some people argue that AI is taking away from real artists' work, and soon real artists won't be able to make any money. They say it isn't fair to just type a text prompt and get art immediately. They basically are invalidating AI art. 

Here is my response to that: First of all, I am doing this for my own enjoyment. I am having fun playing around with it to see what I can come up with. I am not making money or getting anything in return for these images. Second, obviously it takes a lot of time, commitment, and work to produce a quality painting using a physical medium. The value and worth of a real painting is so much greater than an internet image, no matter how you look at it. I see these instagram accounts begging for us to submit photos to them so they can get your permission to sell them as NFT, that is kinda dirty, and scammy, and no one likes it. I get asked at least once a day if I'd like to hand over my work so they can make money off them. Of course I ignore that shit. I do NOT believe that anyone should MAKE MONEY off of AI Generated art. It is not too difficult of work, a machine is creating the images for you. 

TL;DR of that paragraph, is that I 100% support AI Generated Art. I do not support making money or selling them as NFT. The only people that should be making money off of their art, are physical medium artists who spend a ton of time perfecting their work, slaving over a canvas (or whatever they are using) to create something only they could ever have imagined. 

That being said, as long as we are just enjoying ourselves and having fun with Ai Art, I have absolutely zero issues with it, and find it to be a cathartic, relaxing endeavor to explore. 

My favorite apps to use for AI are Wonder, and Starryai. I don't "do" discord, so I am not using Midjourney and never have. It is probably the best one based on all the images I have seen, but again... I don't understand Discord. That's "for the children" as Kathleen Madigan, my favorite comedian, would say.

I will now link a few of them for you, if you, Dear Reader, would like to try it out:

Wonder on the app store, Wonder on the Play store

Starryai 

Nightcafe 

Google around to find some prompt websites that will give you some assistance at how to write really great ones, in order to get the image you are wanting. 

And now, enjoy! I mean... I do.