Midjourney
In plain wordsA popular paid AI image generator, first used by typing prompts into the chat app Discord, known for its polished, painterly look; it can also animate images into short videos.
A proprietary text-to-imagetext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds. service from Midjourney, Inc., a San Francisco company that describes itself as an independent research lab. Prompts are submitted — at first only as commands to a bot on the Discord chat platform, and since August 2024 also through a web app — and each returns a grid of candidate images to upscale, vary, remix or edit. The models are closed and their architecture undisclosed. Midjourney is known for a distinctive, polished aesthetic and frequent version releases: V6 (December 2023), V6.1 (July 2024), V7 (April 2025) and V8 (alpha, March 2026); as of October 2026 the default was V8.2 (July 2026), and a separate Niji series targets anime styles. Settings such as aspect ratio, stylization, style references and seedsrandom seed, n.: A number that fixes the 'random' choices a computer makes; reuse the same seed and settings, and an image generator produces the same picture again. are given as command-line-style parameters, and still images can be animated into short clips. The company has been sued for copyright infringement by a group of artists (2023), by Disney and Universal (June 2025) and by Warner Bros. Discovery (September 2025).
I rerolled the Midjourney grid four times before one of the hands looked right.
Origin
Founded by David Holz, a co-founder of the hand-tracking company Leap Motion. Its first model appeared in February 2022 and its Discord open beta began on 12 July 2022. In 2022, Jason Allen's Midjourney-made 'Théâtre D'opéra Spatial' won first prize in the Colorado State Fair's digital-art category, igniting a public debate over AI art.
Related
- text-to-image modeltext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds.
- AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art.
- Stable DiffusionStable Diffusion, prop. n.: A widely used image-generating AI whose model files were released for anyone to download, so people could run it on their own computers and adapt it.
- DALL·EDALL·E, prop. n.: OpenAI's pioneering series of image generators, named after the painter Salvador Dalí and the robot WALL·E, which showed in 2021–2023 that AI could draw almost anything described in words.
- promptprompt, n.: The message or instructions you give an AI system — a question, a request, some examples or a document — that it responds to. Clearer prompts generally get better results.
- AI copyright litigationAI copyright litigation, n.: The many lawsuits in which authors, artists, news organizations, record labels and others accuse AI companies of copying their work without permission to build or run AI models.
- random seedrandom seed, n.: A number that fixes the 'random' choices a computer makes; reuse the same seed and settings, and an image generator produces the same picture again.
Sources
- Midjourney (2026). Version. Midjourney documentation. docs.midjourney.com/hc/en-us/articles/32199405667853-Version
Mentioned in
AI artAI art, n.: Images, music or other artworks made with the help of AI — from early computer drawing programs to today's prompt-based image generators — and the debate over whether and how such work counts as art., text-to-image modeltext-to-image model, n.: An AI system that creates a picture from a written description, such as 'a fox reading a newspaper, in watercolor', usually within seconds., DALL·EDALL·E, prop. n.: OpenAI's pioneering series of image generators, named after the painter Salvador Dalí and the robot WALL·E, which showed in 2021–2023 that AI could draw almost anything described in words., AI handsAI hands, n.: The tendency of early AI image generators to draw hands badly — extra or missing fingers, twisted joints — which became a running joke and a quick way to spot fake images., Balenciaga PopeBalenciaga Pope, prop. n.: A 2023 AI-generated photo of Pope Francis in a stylish white puffer coat that fooled many viewers, becoming a landmark example of how convincing fake images had become.