[HN Gopher] Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone
        
       Author : meetpateltech
       Score  : 315 points
       Date   : 2024-08-21 17:11 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.midjourney.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.midjourney.com)
        
       | meetpateltech wrote:
       | > The Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone. We're
       | also temporarily turning on free trials to let you check it out.
       | Have fun!
       | 
       | https://x.com/midjourney/status/1826305298560418171
        
       | pizzathyme wrote:
       | This is a _interesting_ company to watch in the Gen AI space
       | since they don 't have all the same restrictions as the bigger
       | companies.
       | 
       | Crazy this took them so long, and also crazy that they got so far
       | through a very confusing Discord experience.
        
         | paxys wrote:
         | Crazier still that they have been able to achieve what they
         | have with zero external funding.
        
         | golergka wrote:
         | Using discord is a great way to focus on what's important and
         | get not great, but good enough ux and community tools basically
         | for free.
        
           | derefr wrote:
           | That and you get user observability for free, and support
           | injection in a way that to this day there's no good way to do
           | in an "app" experience.
           | 
           | Presuming your bot requires people to interact with it in
           | public channels, your CSRs can then just sit in those
           | channels watching people using the bot, and step in if
           | they're struggling. It's a far more impactful way to leverage
           | support staff than sticking a support interface on your
           | website and hoping people will reach out through it.
           | 
           | It's actually akin to the benefit of a physically-situated
           | product demo experience, e.g. the product tables at an Apple
           | Store.
           | 
           | And, also like an Apple Store, customers can also watch what
           | _one-another_ are doing /attempting, and so can both learn
           | from one another, and act as informal support for one-
           | another.
        
         | smusamashah wrote:
         | What do you mean by no restrictions? My account was flagged and
         | under review after using two bold prompts.
        
           | matsemann wrote:
           | The _company_ doesn 't have the same restrictions. They're
           | not talking about the ai model.
        
         | rambojohnson wrote:
         | what do you mean they don't have restrictions?
        
           | matsemann wrote:
           | Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc all have to shoehorn these
           | things into their products to stay on top, but it's not their
           | core business and they don't want it to take away from their
           | ads or licenses they sell. Midjourney as a company is much
           | freer to innovate without the burden of the restrictions of
           | an established company.
        
         | seatac76 wrote:
         | Try creating something mocking Xi Jinping.
        
           | thot_experiment wrote:
           | wait really? i'm not gonna sign up for midjourney but it's
           | surprising to me that this would be restricted
        
             | demadog wrote:
             | Yep - they self-censor themselves according to China's
             | whims, just so they can have China access now only to be
             | banned by the great firewall 1 year from now after Chines
             | startups scrape all their image outputs for training.
        
           | rchaud wrote:
           | Why is AI needed for that? Political satire doesn't require
           | anything more than adding a text balloon to an already
           | existing picture.
        
         | yas_hmaheshwari wrote:
         | Haha, that was the craziest part about signing on midjourney,
         | when you have to sign up via Discord
         | 
         | I don't use Discord on my office laptop, and that was very odd
         | experience
        
         | xwowsersx wrote:
         | What was the confusing Discord experience? Was it that Discord
         | was the main way to access Midjourney, and it was chaotic? I
         | vaguely remember this, but didn't spend much time there.
        
           | qntmfred wrote:
           | The very fact that it was on discord in the first place was
           | enough for me.
        
         | demadog wrote:
         | The only restrictions they have are that you can't imagine
         | President Xi, nor can you mention anything PG-13 like bathing
         | suits.
        
         | wordofx wrote:
         | > space since they don't have all the same restrictions as the
         | bigger companies.
         | 
         | Can you give an example? Midjourney is heavily censored so it
         | seems like it has a lot of restrictions.
        
           | seattle_spring wrote:
           | What are some examples of behaviors that would exemplify
           | their heavy censorship?
        
             | juped wrote:
             | try generating with the prompt "a spoony bard and a
             | licentious howler", if you're willing to catch a ban for
             | using ted woolsey's horrible, offensive language that was
             | acceptable to 1990s nintendo of america
        
         | jpalomaki wrote:
         | Maybe they got so far thanks to the Discord approach.
         | 
         | When you went to the Discord, you immediately got the endless
         | stream of great looking stuff other people were generating.
         | This was quite powerful way to show what is possible.
         | 
         | I bet one challenge for getting new users engaged with these
         | tools is that you try to generate something, get bad results,
         | get disappointed and never come back.
        
           | Filligree wrote:
           | That's exactly true, and having built a similar bot for
           | friends and acquaintances to use, the effect in question is
           | huge. It makes no sense to go for a webapp first, second or
           | even third.
        
         | BonoboIO wrote:
         | They did a clever thing, they used Discord and their servers as
         | CDN
         | 
         | No hosting of the generated pictures, just send them via
         | discord message and forget them. No S3 or big cloud lambda
         | functions.
         | 
         | Easy to start to make a minimal working prototype.
        
       | k8sToGo wrote:
       | Looks like I still need a discord or a google account and can't
       | just use regular email?
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Yes, unfortunately. That's a no-go for me.
        
           | kxrm wrote:
           | I feel like this is an old man yells at cloud moment but I
           | refuse to link social media or google accounts with other
           | services.
           | 
           | Why should Google's or Discord's policy dictate my
           | participation in the web?
        
             | qclibre22 wrote:
             | So google will rank them higher in search results?
        
             | layer8 wrote:
             | They probably don't want to deal with email registration
             | workflows and want to limit themselves to OAuth, but that's
             | not user/customer-friendly.
        
             | mark242 wrote:
             | Because the alternative is pretty provably worse for you,
             | and for them.
             | 
             | * You have to save your (hopefully unique!) email/password
             | in a password manager which is effectively contradictory to
             | your "I won't use a cloud service" argument.
             | 
             | * The company needs to build out a whole email/password
             | authentication flow, including forgetting your password,
             | resetting your password, hints, rate limiting, etc etc, all
             | things that Google/Apple have entire dedicated engineering
             | teams tackling; alternatively, there are solid drop-in
             | OAuth libraries for every major language out there.
             | 
             | * Most people do not want to manage passwords and so take
             | the absolute lazy route of reusing their passwords across
             | all kinds of services. This winds up with breached accounts
             | because Joe Smith decided to use his LinkedIn
             | email/password on Midjourney.
             | 
             | * People have multiple email addresses and as a result wind
             | up forgetting which email address/password they used for a
             | given site.
             | 
             | Auth is the number one customer service problem on almost
             | any service out there. When you look at the sheer number of
             | tickets, auth failures and handholding always dominate time
             | spent helping customers, and it isn't close. If Midjourney
             | alienates 1 potential customer out of 100, but the other 99
             | have an easier sign-in experience and don't have to worry
             | about any of the above, that is an absolute win.
        
               | mikae1 wrote:
               | _> People have multiple email addresses and as a result
               | wind up forgetting which email address /password they
               | used for a given site._
               | 
               | Effectively you mean that people have multiple Google
               | accounts?
        
               | kxrm wrote:
               | All very thoughtful arguments but I think this solution
               | to these problems is flawed. I don't believe we should be
               | solving authentication management problems by handing
               | over all authentication capabilities and responsibilities
               | to one or two mega companies.
               | 
               | Especially since those companies can wield this enormous
               | power by removing my access to this service because I may
               | or may not have violated a policy unrelated to this
               | service.
               | 
               | There has to be a better way.
        
               | skybrian wrote:
               | There is: passkeys and alternative password managers.
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | there's web3, where users have a private key and the
               | public key is on a cryptocurrency chain, but adoption
               | there has been slow. there's also a number of problems
               | with that approach, but that's the other option on the
               | table.
               | 
               | I want to believe, but sadly there's no market for it.
               | unless someone wants to start a privacy minded
               | alternative to auth0, and figure out a business model
               | that works , which is to say, are you willing to pay for
               | this better way? are there enough other people willing to
               | pay a company for privacy to make it a lucrative
               | worthwhile business? because users are trained to think
               | that software should be free-as-in-beer but
               | unfortunately, developing software is expensive and those
               | costs have to be recouped somehow. people say they want
               | to pay, but revealed preferences are they don't.
        
               | mindcandy wrote:
               | While we are all waiting for the world to sort these
               | problems out, companies that are not interested in
               | solving them for the world will continue to use SSO
               | techniques.
               | 
               | I'm very not impressed by this deep, extended critique of
               | machine learning researchers using common security best
               | practices on the grounds that those practices involve an
               | imperfect user experience for those requiring perfect
               | anonymity...
        
               | rurp wrote:
               | You make it sound untenable to support email/password
               | auth, but given that the vast majority of low tech and
               | high tech online services manage it just fine, I think
               | you might be exaggerating a bit. Since Midjourney is
               | already outsourcing their auth flow, they could just as
               | easily use a third party that supports the most common
               | form of account creation.
        
               | marssaxman wrote:
               | All of what you say may well be true, and yet: everyone
               | else on the internet manages to make it work.
               | 
               | Password managers don't have to be cloud services. The
               | user gets to choose.
               | 
               | Some of us like to use a different email address for each
               | account _on purpose_.
        
             | stuffoverflow wrote:
             | Why not just make another google account that you solely
             | use for registration in services like these? Use a virtual
             | machine with VPN if you really do not want it to be linked
             | with your real account.
             | 
             | It is a bit of extra work but that's just how it is
             | nowadays.
        
               | mdp2021 wrote:
               | Does not google require a telephone number to create
               | accounts nowadays? In some regions there are no anonymous
               | SIM cards by law. (Temporary number services may not work
               | well.)
        
               | KolmogorovComp wrote:
               | Midjourney is a paid-only service anyway, you would need
               | to enter your credit card, so no anonymity.
        
               | mdp2021 wrote:
               | There do exist anonymous credit cards, paid with cash,
               | for fixed relatively small amounts (e.g. ~100u. In Europe
               | there are restrictions to these kind of payment methods -
               | cards must be below, I believe, 150EUR).
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | The issue is you have to disclose your phone number to
               | Google, not (just) to Midjourney, AND Google will know
               | you use Midjourney.
               | 
               | There's too much unnecessary connected PII data generated
               | by such mechanisms.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | It is very much possible to create temporary credit cards
               | linked to your real bank account for one-off purchases.
               | Apple Card provides that as a service (US only) and other
               | countries have similar systems that every bank adheres
               | to.
               | 
               | Plus, you may not mind not being anonymous to Midjourney
               | but mind not being anonymous to some other service (like
               | Google).
        
               | kxrm wrote:
               | I am pretty sure that if any account I own at Google is
               | caught violating policy, all other accounts are subject
               | to being disabled.
        
               | nottorp wrote:
               | I think the only way to make a google account without a
               | phone number these days is to factory reset an android
               | phone and take the sim out beforehand.
               | 
               | If that even still works...
        
             | skybrian wrote:
             | Yeah, they should add Github support.
        
         | mrweasel wrote:
         | While I understand that they might need some account or token
         | to stop abuse, just having my sign in is a big no for anything
         | I just want to try out. After the whole social media trend more
         | or less collapsed into a privacy invading data collection
         | nightmare, I've been extremely reluctant to sign up for
         | anything.
        
           | ffsm8 wrote:
           | You honestly think giving full, no rate limited free access
           | is viable in the LLM space, where each execution is actually
           | pretty expensive?
           | 
           | Because that's what you're asking for, as it'd be trivial to
           | reset the rate without accounts.
        
             | stemlord wrote:
             | Chatgpt does it
        
               | ffsm8 wrote:
               | No, it doesn't. you need to register for chatgpt.
        
               | lofenfew wrote:
               | go try it right now lol
               | 
               | i assume they still have ip/browser fingerprint based
               | rate limiting, but you can type in a prompt and get an
               | answer with zero login or anything else.
        
               | ffsm8 wrote:
               | I'm prompted for a login/register. You're likely
               | authenticating via Apple or Google social auth
        
               | fragmede wrote:
               | ChatGPT.com no longer requires registration to it
               | ChatGPT-3.5.
        
             | mrweasel wrote:
             | No no, I understand that it's not a viable financial
             | option, I just don't understand that anyone would trust any
             | of these companies with any sort of information.
             | 
             | Most of the current AI companies are going to fail or get
             | bought up, so you have no idea where that account
             | information, all your prompts and all the answers will
             | eventually go. After social media, I don't really see any
             | reason why anyone would trust any tech company with any
             | sort of information, unless you really really have to. If I
             | want to run an LLM, then I'll get one that can run on my
             | own computer, even if that mean forgoing certain features.
        
       | Jack5500 wrote:
       | What the really need is user management, so big corps can adopt
       | it. Currently with the user self-service it's a no-go.
        
         | danielbln wrote:
         | For a company workshop I wanted to pay for Midjourney to invite
         | a bot into a private Discord with the workshop participants. We
         | couldn't find a way of using it as a company account, and
         | ultimately every participant had to get a sub, which was less
         | than ideal. If it was today I would have them use Flux in some
         | hosted version.
        
       | xnorswap wrote:
       | I have to say I'm very impressed. I've previously used free
       | generators for generating scenery for my D&D campaign, and
       | running a prompt here that previously took me dozens of tweaks to
       | get something reasonable, instantly returned me a set of high
       | quality images, at least one of which was much closer to my
       | mind's eye than anything in those dozens of previous attempts.
       | 
       | ( Prompting: An iron-gated door, set into a light stone arch, all
       | deep set into the side of a gentle hill, as if the entrance to a
       | forgotten crypt. The hill is lightly wooded, there is foliage in
       | season. It is early evening. --v 6.1 )
       | 
       | And result:
       | https://cdn.midjourney.com/5b56f713-3d64-471f-8c3c-08a0247e6...
       | 
       | The style matches exactly what I'd want too, it's captured
       | "Fantasy RP book illustration" extremely well, despite that not
       | being in the prompt!
        
         | skybrian wrote:
         | Midjourney's "house style" leans towards fantasy by default.
        
       | coumbaya wrote:
       | Flux, latest Midjourney, or even dall-e... I'm still disappointed
       | that 3 of my sci-fi prompts never works (interior of an O'Neill
       | Cylinder, Space elevator, rotating space station). I hope someone
       | makes lora of those one day.
        
         | xnorswap wrote:
         | What prompts are you using for the space station? I think it
         | pretty much nails it after some prompt tweaking.
         | 
         | First attempt:
         | 
         | https://cdn.midjourney.com/686f364f-188f-4065-813f-b45d21972...
         | 
         | Tweaking to specify spokes around the central axis:
         | 
         | https://cdn.midjourney.com/d18d3ad3-3fd0-461e-a3a8-5fc46f0ba...
        
           | iwontberude wrote:
           | Space Wagon Wheel
        
             | bonestamp2 wrote:
             | This makes me think the next generation needs an Oregon
             | Trail type game for space travel.
        
           | coumbaya wrote:
           | Ah thanks, seems it got better at this one then ! I've tried
           | the 2 other prompts with the latest but the space station I
           | had only tried in v5.
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | You can train your own lora online,
         | https://replicate.com/ostris/flux-dev-lora-trainer/train
         | 
         | I think this is the most popular one right now online for Flux.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | "Halo, Interior of a cylindrical space station habitat, upside
         | down, fields, lakes, rivers, housing, rivers running around
         | cylinder roof, Rick Guidice artwork, in space, stars visible
         | through windows"
         | 
         | https://cdn.midjourney.com/ed234782-ac5c-41d7-99e9-20ce122cd...
         | 
         | They definitely struggle with getting the land moving up the
         | wall and often it treats the cylinder like a window onto earth
         | at ground level but I think with tweaking the weighting or
         | order of terms and enough rolls of the dice you could get it.
        
       | deisteve wrote:
       | Haven't used Midjourney since Flux dropped
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | Flux seems to give the backgrounds even more detail and
         | coherence compared to MJ, it's a surprisingly (or maybe not
         | given its size) great model.
        
         | indigodaddy wrote:
         | where can we try/use? Is it just the obvious google result of
         | https://getimg.ai/models/flux ?
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | Their Github repo provides some links if you want to try it
           | online: https://github.com/black-forest-labs/flux
        
           | nullandvoid wrote:
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYVucud3ptc has good coverage
           | of running locally and via web (https://fal.ai/models)
        
           | minimaxir wrote:
           | Replicate, although not fully free, has the bonus of outputs
           | from Flux (from their endpoints only) able to be used for
           | commercial purposes whereas that is normally only applicable
           | for Flux schnell:
           | 
           | https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-dev
           | 
           | https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-schnell
        
             | vunderba wrote:
             | Are you sure that's true?
             | 
             | https://github.com/black-forest-
             | labs/flux/blob/main/model_li...
             | 
             | From the license: _" We claim no ownership rights in and to
             | the Outputs. You are solely responsible for the Outputs you
             | generate and their subsequent uses in accordance with this
             | License. You may use Output for any purpose (including for
             | commercial purposes), except as expressly prohibited
             | herein. You may not use the Output to train, fine-tune or
             | distill a model that is competitive with the FLUX.1 [dev]
             | Model."_
             | 
             | This license seems to indicate that the images from the dev
             | model _CAN_ be used for commercial purposes outside of
             | using those images to train derivative models. It would be
             | a little weird to me that they 'd allow you to use FluxDev
             | images for commercial purposes IF AND ONLY IF the model
             | host was Replicate.
        
           | mgiannopoulos wrote:
           | Grok on Twitter Premium has Flux integrated.
        
         | resource_waste wrote:
         | MJ has always been this pixar-style-hyperfit SD variant. It
         | almost seemed to just repeat google images but with gloss.
         | 
         | Or at least a year ago it was like that.
        
           | mdp2021 wrote:
           | For a period I daily checked its best outputs page: the
           | "pixar" style was frequent, but far from being the only one.
           | "Typical" like 10 is the type (mode) in
           | 10+9+9+8+8+7+7+6+6+5+5+4+4+3+3+2+2+1+1 - but still 10% of the
           | whole and just one possibility of all.
           | 
           | Midlibrary.io recognizes 5500 styles Midjourney knows.
        
           | furyofantares wrote:
           | Here's a project I did over a year ago in Midjourney where I
           | took all art for the card game Spectromancer and re-themed
           | each piece in 26 different styles
           | 
           | https://kellydornhaus.github.io/Variations/
        
           | paretoer wrote:
           | That is the base style. You can get much different image
           | qualities adding different types of film, cameras, etc to the
           | prompt.
           | 
           | With that said, I loved Midjourney a year ago but I am at the
           | point I have seen enough AI art to last several lives.
           | 
           | AI art reminds me of eating wasabi. It is absolutely amazing
           | at first but I quickly get totally sick of it.
        
       | weinzierl wrote:
       | In iOS Safari I get                   Unable to process request
       | due to missing initial state. This may happen if browser
       | sessionStorage is inaccessible or accidentally cleared. Some
       | specific scenarios are - 1) Using IDP-Initiated SAML SSO. 2)
       | Using signInWithRedirect in a storage-partitioned browser
       | environment.
       | 
       | EDIT: I tried again from scratch in a new tab and this time it
       | worked. So, temporary hiccup.
       | 
       | EDIT2: I have all the images I created on Discord in the web app
       | - very nice!
        
       | SoftMachine wrote:
       | Open to everyone, but you must have Google or Discord account.
       | Has the definition of everyone changed?
        
         | chipgap98 wrote:
         | Anyone can sign up for one of those accounts. I don't really
         | see why that would make this misleading
        
         | handfuloflight wrote:
         | Can everyone have a Google is Discord account?
        
           | handfuloflight wrote:
           | Can everyone have a Google or* Discord account?
        
         | bhhaskin wrote:
         | If your site or service only has social logins then it's a hard
         | no from me.
        
         | cabbageicefruit wrote:
         | Open to everyone, but requires a computer. Has the definition
         | of everyone changed?
        
           | stemlord wrote:
           | Equating participating in walled garden social platforms to
           | simply having a computer is bleak
        
             | cabbageicefruit wrote:
             | Pretending that someone can't use your software because
             | they don't want to create a login through your providers is
             | idiotic.
        
             | rajamaka wrote:
             | Can you explain the difference between creating an
             | anonymous google account with fake information compared to
             | an anonymous midjourney account with fake information?
        
               | stonogo wrote:
               | Creating fake accounts violates Google's terms of
               | service.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | Google accounts require a phone number. How do you
               | reliably fake that internationally without risking your
               | money on some shady service?
        
             | bufferoverflow wrote:
             | Nonsense. Creating a throwaway account takes a couple of
             | minutes.
             | 
             | What a strangely deranged view of the world some people
             | have.
        
         | stemlord wrote:
         | I truly thought the title meant they are no longer tied to
         | discord. Excited me for a minute
        
           | seoulmetro wrote:
           | Yep. "Web experience" made me think there was an actual
           | website experience. There still isn't a web experience and
           | it's still not open to everyone. lol
        
         | geor9e wrote:
         | Touche. But it's certainly leagues more "everyone" today than
         | it was yesterday. It used to require arcane knowledge of deep
         | Discord server bot navigation. I gave up after 20 minutes and
         | never figured it out. Today I tried it in seconds.
         | 
         | I have about 40+ google accounts for reasons, so I don't begin
         | to understand the aversion some have to registering a burner
         | google/discord/facebook/etc account under their hampster's
         | name, but many of my closest friends are just like you so I
         | respect it anyway, whatever principle it is.
        
           | contrarian1234 wrote:
           | Where do you quickly get burner phone numbers for
           | registration ?
        
             | fragmede wrote:
             | https://apps.apple.com/us/app/burner-second-phone-
             | number/id5...
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | The reviews don't inspire any confidence.
        
             | taude wrote:
             | why do you need a phone number for a google account?
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | Because Google asks for it to let you register.
        
               | taude wrote:
               | Really? Wow. I have like 20 gmail accounts. I guess I got
               | them before they started requiring phone numbers.
        
               | latexr wrote:
               | Do you use all 20 regularly? Because if you don't,
               | there's a chance that next time you try to login to one
               | of them on the web they'll ask you to add a phone number
               | and not let you continue until you do. But if you have
               | them setup in an email client, it should still work.
        
           | latexr wrote:
           | > I don't begin to understand the aversion some have to
           | registering a burner google/discord/Facebook/etc
           | 
           | Maybe because several of those tend to ask for phone
           | verification nowadays, and phone burner services tend to
           | either not work or look so shady it looks like a major gamble
           | to give them any payment information?
        
       | mintplant wrote:
       | The splash screen locked up my fairly-recent Android phone. Like,
       | I had to hard-reboot.
        
       | weinzierl wrote:
       | I only see a form field for _/ imagine_. How can I _/ describe_?
       | 
       | The docs say to hover over the uploaded image or use the test
       | tube icon from the sidebar, neither of which seem to be available
       | on mobile.
        
         | skar3 wrote:
         | I nave the same problem
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | Ideogram 2.0 was also released today, and it's nerfed (anatomy is
       | lot worse than 1.0 now) just like StableDiffusion versions after
       | 1.5 which is very disappointing.
       | 
       | Well good thing we have Flux out in the open now, both midjourney
       | releasing web version or ideogram releasing there 2.0 on the same
       | day after 2 weeks of flux won't redeem them as much. Flux Dev is
       | amazing, check what SD community is doing with it on
       | https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/ . It can do fine
       | tuning, there are Loras now, even control net. It can gen casual
       | photos like no other tool out there, you won't be able to tell
       | they are AI without looking way too deep.
        
         | arizen wrote:
         | Are there any publicly accessible Flux image generation
         | services you may recommend to check out?
        
           | smusamashah wrote:
           | There are a few.
           | 
           | https://fastflux.ai/ for instant image gen using Schnell (but
           | its fixed on 4 steps and is mainly a tech show off of
           | inference engine by runware.ai)
           | 
           | https://www.segmind.com/ has API support with lots of
           | options, I am using it to generate and set wallpaper using an
           | AHK script. It's very very slow though.
           | 
           | https://replicate.com/black-forest-labs/flux-
           | schnell/example...
           | 
           | https://huggingface.co/spaces/black-forest-
           | labs/FLUX.1-schne...
           | 
           | https://getimg.ai/text-to-image
           | 
           | There are other tools now if you Google 'Flux image generator
           | online'
        
           | stuffoverflow wrote:
           | Huggingface has quite a few spaces with the base dev model as
           | well as different variations of it.
           | 
           | https://huggingface.co/spaces?sort=trending&search=dev
        
           | e98cuenc wrote:
           | Check out https://www.freepik.com/pikaso you can try flux and
           | flux realism
        
           | zone411 wrote:
           | 90%+ of Flux image generations will be done through Grok.
        
           | LeoPanthera wrote:
           | If you have a suitably powerful M-Mac or iOS device, you can
           | run it locally using "Draw Things", which is free.
        
             | ProfessorLayton wrote:
             | Whoa, thanks for the tip!
        
             | evilduck wrote:
             | Just to clarify for other readers, Draw Things has support
             | and provides download links to quants but no iOS device can
             | run the full precision model which means you will get
             | slightly different and usually lower quality output than
             | stuff you may see elsewhere, even if you use the same
             | settings. It's still damn impressive though.
        
               | liuliu wrote:
               | Quality issue should be mainly due to using FP16
               | accmulators for GEMM in M1-M2, A14-A16 devices (it is not
               | a problem for SD v1 / SDXL models due to smaller channel
               | count). This is changed to FP32 accmulators for GEMM in
               | these devices with 1.20240820.1 release. q8p should have
               | comparable quality to non-quantized models (in Draw
               | Things, it is called FLUX.1 [dev] (Exact)).
        
               | evilduck wrote:
               | Hey the creator! Thanks for all your hard work. Put in a
               | tip feature so I can give you money.
        
               | Der_Einzige wrote:
               | Claims that quantization doesn't hurt models are made all
               | the time but rely on the fact that almost all evaluations
               | today of LLMs hardly scratch their surface. If we
               | evaluated LLMs properly, even large quants would be
               | detectably worse, and by a significant amount.
        
               | Loranubi wrote:
               | Not saying I disagree with you. But you don't present any
               | evaluation results for your claim either.
        
               | liuliu wrote:
               | A model trained on BF16 that within the range of FP16
               | have effective bit rate of 13-bit at max (e5m7).
               | Reasonable quantization (at 8-bit) gets you weight error
               | (i.e. L2 distance on weights) down to < 1e-3, and full
               | diffusion run (30 steps) have result with L2 distance
               | (comparing to unquantized) < 5e-2.
               | 
               | I think there is a line somewhere between 4-bit to 8-bit
               | that will hurt performance (for both diffusion models and
               | LLM). But I doubt the line is between 8-bit to 13-bit.
               | 
               | (Another case in point: you can use generic lossless
               | compression to get model weights from 13bit down to 11bit
               | by just zip exponent and mantissa separately, that
               | suggests the effective bit rate is lower than 13bit on
               | full-precision model).
        
               | Der_Einzige wrote:
               | I buy these kinds of arguments but the moment a company
               | or NeurIPS researcher claims even a "tiny" bit of loss
               | happens, I become suspicious. I don't buy most claims of
               | "we get 99%+ of the performance" made in practice.
               | 
               | But yes, I do believe that we will find proper lossless
               | quants, and eventually (for real this time) get "only a
               | little bit of loss" quants, but I don't think that the
               | current 8 bits are there yet.
               | 
               | Also, quantized models often have worse GPU utilization
               | which harms tokens/s if you have the hardware capable to
               | run the unquantized types. It seems to depend on the
               | quant. SD models seem to get faster when quantized, but
               | LLMs are often slower. Very weird.
        
           | Dwedit wrote:
           | Twitter's image generator is the pro version of Flux.
        
           | paulcjh wrote:
           | We're one of the Black Forest Labs partners, you can try the
           | models here: https://www.mystic.ai/black-forest-labs
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | While I won't say that realism is a solved problem, SD has been
         | able to produce unbelievably realistic photo-level images using
         | "Realism Engine"/NightVisionXL/etc for a while now.
         | 
         | Flux's power isn't necessarily in its ability to produce
         | realistic images, so much as its increased size gives it a FAR
         | superior ability to more closely follow the prompt.
        
           | crooked-v wrote:
           | Also to 'understand' complicated prompts (however far that
           | goes when talking image models). For example, describing two
           | subjects in detail with a relationship between them ("a cat
           | and a man and the cat is standing on the man's head and the
           | cat has red hair and the man is wearing purple glasses")
           | reliably works with Flux, even the 'light' models, but is a
           | crapshoot with SD.
        
           | smusamashah wrote:
           | I hadn't seen Realism Engine, looks good. Check Boreal FD
           | https://civitai.com/models/639937?modelVersionId=715729 for
           | the kind of casual photography realism I was talking about. I
           | don't remember seeing that quality with SD.
           | 
           | Also see https://civitai.com/models/652699/amateur-
           | photography-flux-d...
           | 
           | and
           | 
           | https://civitai.com/models/660731/35mm-photo-flux
        
         | ethanpil wrote:
         | Why are they getting worse?
        
           | SV_BubbleTime wrote:
           | People who don't use them are using their hobby of being
           | offended to pressure the model makers to censor.
        
           | Der_Einzige wrote:
           | Because they don't like the fact that the majority of custom
           | content for uncensored models is hardcore porn.
        
             | user_7832 wrote:
             | Which honestly is rather silly for the companies making the
             | models. The cat's already out of the bag, and _if_ a
             | competitor manages to make a similar /good-enough
             | (uncensored) model there's nothing midjourney etc will have
             | going for them.
             | 
             | Or as someone once said, if they took porn off the
             | internet, there'd only be one website left, and it'd be
             | called "Bring Back the Porn!".
        
         | iJohnDoe wrote:
         | Was heavily using StableDiffusion a handful of months ago.
         | Seemed like new achievements were being made all the time.
         | 
         | What happened with 1.5 and newer? I'm out of the loop.
        
           | smusamashah wrote:
           | SD 1.5 was not censored. Later version were trained with the
           | the censored data. A side of that was bad anatomy. Search for
           | stable diffusion woman lying on grass. I think this was SD3.
           | It generates monstrosities when you ask for a woman on grass.
           | 
           | I liked ideogram's approach. It looked like their training
           | data was not censored as much (it still didn't render
           | privates). The generated images are checked are tested for
           | nudity before presenting to user, if found, image is replaced
           | by a placeholder.
           | 
           | If you check SD reddit, community seems to have jumped ship
           | to flux. It has great prompt adherence. You don't have to
           | employ silly tricks to get what you want. Ideogram also has
           | amazing prompt adherence.
        
             | Filligree wrote:
             | We did have SDXL in-between, and while that one was also
             | censored, the censoring has been long since removed in
             | fine-tunes.
             | 
             | Flux is _also_ censored, but in a way that doesn 't usually
             | break anatomy. It took about a week before people figured
             | out how to start decensoring it.
        
       | jrm4 wrote:
       | Yes, I'm finding the "meh" here is expandable to most of the
       | companies, and that's a great thing (e.g just got a $500 card and
       | OpenHermes feels comparable to anything and it's running fully
       | locally) I know there's often not a lot to be optimistic about,
       | but the fact that so called "AI" is absolutely de-facto free/open
       | source is perhaps just about the best way this stuff could roll
       | out.
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | "Midjourney web experience is now open to everyone"...
       | 
       | "Enable JavaScript and cookies to continue"...
        
       | bloqs wrote:
       | I can hear the 'coomers' posting with glee
        
         | MrNeon wrote:
         | MJ coomers? The same MJ that bans accounts for coomer content?
         | 
         | Not sure that will change just because of a new frontend.
        
       | tschellenbach wrote:
       | I've been using it for a while and it's amazing :)
        
       | jiggawatts wrote:
       | It's just astonishing to me how difficult it still seems to be
       | for the Midjourney team to develop a web site that amounts to
       | little more than a textbox, a button, and an img tag.
       | 
       | I tried their new web experience, and... it's just broken. It
       | doesn't work. There's a showcase of other people's work, and
       | that's it. I can't click the text-box, it's greyed out. It says
       | "subscribe to start creating", but there's is _no "subscribe"
       | button!_
       | 
       | Mindblowing.
        
         | wmf wrote:
         | There's a theory that Midjourney didn't want to pay for image
         | hosting (which they were getting for free from Discord).
        
           | GaggiX wrote:
           | Images has been available on their website for quite some
           | time.
        
           | jiggawatts wrote:
           | That has got to be a rounding error in their finances in
           | comparison to the GPU time required to _generate_ the images
           | in the first place.
        
           | vunderba wrote:
           | That must have been a LOOONNG time ago, I've been a user of
           | MJ since ~version 3 a couple years back - and I remember
           | custom scraping my images way back in the day and they were
           | coming from Google Cloud Storage, e.g.
           | 
           | https://storage.googleapis.com/dream-machines-
           | output/378f0f1...
        
       | cma wrote:
       | Seems to be a direct response to Black Forest Labs' Flux being
       | offered on Twitter with a lot of uptake.
        
       | kgraves wrote:
       | I'm so glad that Midjourney and Flux is making creativity
       | accessible to everyone, I don't need to have a subscription to MJ
       | anymore now that Flux is getting better.
       | 
       | Everybody can now be an artist and have creativity for free now.
       | 
       | What a time to be alive.
        
         | latexr wrote:
         | Creativity has always been accessible to everyone. Creativity
         | is a _concept_ which only requires imagination. Those ideas can
         | take many forms, including writing, cooking, sewing, doing
         | skateboard tricks... It doesn't mean rearranging pixels on
         | screen by _vaguely_ describing something.
        
       | quesomaster9000 wrote:
       | And it still can't draw a spork yet [1]
       | 
       | 1: https://canaidrawasporkyet.org/
        
         | BryanLegend wrote:
         | I don't see midjourney on that site.
        
         | Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
         | I asked DALL-E for a spork and it did it just fine.
         | 
         | https://imgur.com/5bvBTcB
        
         | GaggiX wrote:
         | prompt: "spork", model: "NovelAI v3" (aka finetuned SDXL)
         | 
         | https://ibb.co/nLMZfjY
        
         | vunderba wrote:
         | MJ can't do it, but took me 10 seconds genning locally on an
         | SDXL checkpoint:
         | 
         | https://gondolaprime.pw/pictures/sporks-generative.jpg
         | 
         | It's a rather arbitrary metric. All it proves is that the token
         | "spork" wasn't in midjourney's training data. _A FAR better
         | test for adherence is how well a model does when a detailed
         | description for an untrained concept is provided as the
         | prompt._
        
           | quesomaster9000 wrote:
           | Yup it's an arbitrary metric, but I tried cajoling various
           | image models into generating spork pictures with highly
           | detailed descriptions (I have ComfyUI & AUTOMATIC1111
           | locally, and many models), which lead to me creating the
           | site.
           | 
           | I'd say a better test for adherence is how well a model does
           | when the detailed description falls in between two very well
           | known concepts - it's kinda like those pictures from the
           | 1500s of exotic animals seen by explorers drawn by people
           | using only the field notes after a long voyage back.
        
             | vunderba wrote:
             | Here's a test against the full Flux Dev model where we try
             | to describe the physical appearance of a spork without
             | referencing it by name.
             | 
             |  _Prompt: A hybrid kitchen utensil that looks like a spoon
             | with small tine prongs of a fork made of metal, realistic
             | photo_
             | 
             | https://gondolaprime.pw/pictures/flux-spork-like.jpg
             | 
             | The combination of T5 / clip coupled with a much larger
             | model means there's less need to rely on custom LoRAs for
             | unfamiliar concepts which is awesome.
             | 
             | EDIT: If you've got the GPU for it, I'd recommend
             | downloading a copy of the latest version of the SD-WEBUI
             | Forge repo along with the _DEV_ checkpoint of Flux (not
             | schnell). It 's super impressive and I get an iteration
             | speed of roughly 15 seconds per 1024x1024 image.
        
             | vunderba wrote:
             | Welll.... there's a hundred ways we could measure prompt
             | adherence everything from:
             | 
             | - Descriptive -> describing a difficult concept that is
             | most certainly _NOT_ in the training data
             | 
             | - Hybrids -> fusions of familiar concepts
             | 
             | - Platonic overrides -> this is my phrase for attempting to
             | see how well you can _OVERRIDE_ very emphasized training
             | data. For example, a zebra with horizontal stripes.
             | 
             | etc. etc.
        
         | gedy wrote:
         | Haha, I thought it was just me. I was trying to generate a
         | spork for a silly card game and was really frustrated/confused
         | about what the issue was.
        
       | vunderba wrote:
       | Ever since DALL-E 3 completely eclipsed Midjourney in terms of
       | Prompt _ADHERENCE_ (albeit not quality), I 've had very little
       | reason to make use of it. However, in my testing of Flux Dev, I
       | can gen images in roughly 15 seconds in Forge, throw those at a
       | SDXL model such as Dreamshaper in the form of a controlnet and
       | get the best of both worlds, high detail and adherent.
        
         | whywhywhywhy wrote:
         | Dall-E 3 (intentionally) leans away from realism though but in
         | doing so what it leans into is a very tacky and aesthetically
         | naive although competently executed type of image. Gives every
         | image the feeling that you're seeing a bootleg version of a
         | genuine thing and therefore makes everything else it touches
         | feel tacky.
         | 
         | Same feeling you get looking at the airbrushed art on a state
         | fairground ride.
        
         | bambax wrote:
         | In 15 seconds? Really? On my machine with good specs and a 4090
         | flux-dev takes around 400 seconds for 512x512! And flux-schnell
         | at least half. Do you recommend a tutorial for optimization?
        
       | chenglou wrote:
       | Website contributor here! Answering some of the technical
       | questions on Twitter:
       | https://x.com/_chenglou/status/1826425720522080480
        
         | bilekas wrote:
         | Why do I need a Gmail or Discord account to register ?
        
       | seattleeng wrote:
       | Its cool but this feels really late. I just use Ideogram now. The
       | social features are nice
        
       | pknerd wrote:
       | Access blocked: Midjourney's request does not comply with
       | Google's policies
       | 
       | Midjourney's request does not comply with Google's 'Use secure
       | browsers' policy. If this app has a website, you can open a web
       | browser and try signing in from there. If you are attempting to
       | access a wireless network, please follow these instructions.
       | 
       | You can also contact the developer to let them know that their
       | app must comply with Google's 'Use secure browsers' policy.
       | 
       | Learn more about this error
       | 
       | If you are a developer of Midjourney, see error details.
       | 
       | Error 403: disallowed_useragent
        
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       (page generated 2024-08-22 17:01 UTC)