It is one of the most fascinating artificial intelligence systems for generating images. But unlike DALL-E, its name lacks an obvious meaning.
It is a fierce debate, especially among artists, who are being pushed around and competed: do the new artificial intelligence algorithms generate simple images or do they make art? It also becomes extremely difficult to distinguish production coming from a human hand from that designed by advanced computer parameters.
In this coming wave, there is a very prominent platform: Midjourney. It must be said that this “AI” often makes the news: in September 2022, a work produced by MidJourney won an art competition, without anyone noticing anything. And even more recently, a cyberpunk manga was drawn box following box by Midjourney.
Midjourney became very popular and viral in 2022, since it allows any Internet user to generate images by making a more or less detailed description of the image that one wishes to see appear. The instructions can then be refined, requesting new variations of the first images or refining those already created.
There are other platforms of this kind, such as DALL-E, designed by OpenAI, the same company that is behind the famous ChatGPT. DALL-E, moreover, is a double nod to the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí, but also to Wall-E, the little robot from the animated film. A way of symbolizing the encounter between artistic creation and “artificial intelligence”.
Just… the name of the laboratory
And Midjourney, then? Is there a hidden meaning behind the name of this service? Is this a way of evoking any “mid-term journey” (a way of translating the name of the tool), which would tend towards a more elaborate artificial intelligence? Alas, no indication was found. If a meaning exists, it has not been made public.
We have searched the official website and there is no particular explanation. Also by searching more widely on the web. We even posed the question to ChatGPT, but it dries up too. Last attempt was to contact Midjourney directly in hopes of a response. But for now, it’s just a company name, with no obvious meaning.
In an interview with The Verge, the founder of the Midjourney laboratory, David Holz, did not particularly suggest that this name carried a particular symbolism. We just know that there are a dozen of them working on it, that images from Midjourney are teeming on social networks and that you have to go through Discord to use it.
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