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

We don’t think it’s really about art or making deepfakes, but—how do we expand the imaginative powers of the human species? And what does that mean? What does it mean when computers are better at visual imagination than 99 percent of humans? That doesn’t mean we will stop imagining. Cars are faster than humans, but that doesn’t mean we stopped walk

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Midjourney has rapidly become one of the most popular servers on all of Discord, with 2 million members. This has thrust text-to-image AI into the mainstream, which was all part of the plan for Midjourney’s founder David Holz. Holz told The Verge last month (in an excellent interview worth reading in full): “A lot of people ask us, why don’t you ju... See more

with the emergence of AI-driven image-creation platforms like DALL-E, Imagen, and Midjourney, we're on the verge of experiencing perhaps the most revolutionary press-the-button shift since the days of the Kodak Brownie.

The same debates will rage about whether or not prompt based AI imagery can be considered Art, and will just as inevitably be relegated to history once everyone makes use of these tools to better share what is on their mind.

It’s been a while since a particular piece of technology has felt as fraught, efficient, and consequential as today’s text-to-image AI art-generation tools like DALL-E 2 and Midjourney.