“An engine for the imagination”: an interview with David Holz, CEO of AI image generator Midjourney

Our training data is pretty much from the same place as everybody else’s — which is pretty much the internet. Pretty much every big AI model just pulls off all the data it can, all the text it can, all the images it can. Scientifically speaking, we’re at an early point in the space, where everyone grabs everything they can, they dump it in a huge f... See more

Every time you ask the AI to make a picture, it doesn’t really remember or know anything else it’s ever made. It has no will, it has no goals, it has no intention, no storytelling ability. All the ego and will and stories — that’s us. It’s just like an engine. An engine has nowhere to go, but people have places to go. It’s kind of like a hive mind ... See more

So, there have been two breakthroughs [in AI that led to image generation tools]. One is understanding language, and the other is the ability to create images. And when you combine those things, you can create images through the understanding of language.

A lot of the famous artists who use the platform, they’re all saying the same thing, and it’s really interesting. They say, “I feel like Midjourney is an art student, and it has its own style, and when you invoke my name to create an image, it’s like asking an art student to make something inspired by my art. And generally, as an artist, I want peo

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Whereas if you put them in a group, they’ll go “dog” and someone else will go “space dog” and someone else will go “Aztec space dog,” and then all of a sudden, people understand the possibilities, and you’re creating this augmented imagination — an environment where people can learn and play with this new capacity. So we found that people really li

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Right now, people totally misunderstand what AI is. They see it as a tiger. A tiger is dangerous. It might eat me. It’s an adversary. And there’s danger in water, too — you can drown in it — but the danger of a flowing river of water is very different to the danger of a tiger. Water is dangerous, yes, but you can also swim in it, you can make boats

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