Well as the year comes to an end the AI news has definitely slowed down quite a bit but there were a couple big announcements this week followed by a handful of marginal updates so let’s get right into it starting with the fact that mid Journey version 6 is now live.
Taking a peak inside of mid Journey’s Discord, we can see the announcement right here. They are letting the community test an alpha version of the V6 model. It’s got much more accurate prompt following as well as longer prompts, improved coherence and model knowledge, improved image prompting and remix, minor text drawing ability, and improved upscaler. They also say in their update here prompting with V6 is significantly different than V5. You will need to relearn how to prompt. V6 is much more sensitive to your prompt. Avoid junk like award-winning photo realistic 4K 8K things that we’ve kind of gotten into the habit of adding to the end of image prompts in tools like stable diffusion. They do say here this is an alpha test, things will change frequently and without notice so this isn’t the final version of V6.
I did spend some time today playing around with it a little bit and did notice a few interesting things. So, my first prompt that I tested was a photo of a woman looking into the camera with a colorful City skyline in the background. You can see the colors are actually really awesome in these images but they’re not super realistic. If you want realism, you’ve got to add style raw. So, the exact same prompt with style raw generated these images which look much more realistic.
I then wanted to test how it did with hands so I typed a man with a City skyline behind him holding up his hands to the camera and well two out of the four Images look pretty decent but this one he’s only got four fingers on each hand. This one he’s got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven fingers on one of his hands. So, some funky stuff still going on with hands but I do love the colors and contrast that we’re getting out of Mid Journey here. Mid Journey can also do text in your images now so I tested “a penguin holding up a sign that says Mr eow”. And well two out of the four got it. This one just says Mr ELO this one says Mr EO and these two actually managed to get it right.
Now when you do decide on an image to upscale with version six, we don’t have a lot of the options that we have if you’re using Version five. For example, if I scroll up to a version five image here, you can see I’ve got very region zoom out, custom Zoom, pan left, pan up and down. And when we look at V6, most of that is missing. We just have the option to upscale subtle which just makes the image larger, we have upscale creative which supposedly adds some additional creativity to it, and then we’ve got very subtle and very strong. I tried upscaling creative here. This was my original image. You’ll notice on the creative version there’s not a whole lot of difference but if you look at the skin, you’ll notice that it kind of smooth out the skin a little bit but other than that I don’t really see any major differences.
One thing Version six does seem to be good at is you can kind of get a consistent character. So, I created this character here and then wanted to get that same character wearing a hat and was able to generate this image by essentially just remixing this version three here. I clicked on V3, I got my remix box here and then changed the prompt a little bit to have her wearing a hat instead and it looks like the same person just wearing a hat and at a different angle. Here’s the new image that I created. Here’s the original image I created. You could probably argue that that’s the same person just wearing a different outfit.
The other thing that mid-Journey version 6 is really good at is if you want to add a lot of details into your prompt, it actually does a pretty good job of grabbing all of the stuff that you were trying to put into it. So, for example, I can do a three-headed monster wearing sunglasses staring at
a TV sitting on a red couch a monkey is on the TV. Let’s see how much of that it actually gets. On first attempt, it got some of that. It didn’t get my three-headed monster but it got a monkey on the TV, sunglasses, red couch. It just missed the three-headed monster. So now let’s try a purple wolf in a forest with bats flying over it. The Sun is setting behind the trees and it got most of that, making these images a pretty good job of adhering to the prompt that I put in. You’ll notice here that if I generate the same prompt in mid-Journey version 5, it kind of tries to make a wolf bat hybrid thing in most of them.
If you want to use mid-Journey version 6, you do have to have a mid-journey paid plan but you can log into the mid-journey bot, type /settings and you’ll see a little drop down here and you can select mid-Journey model V6 Alpha. I also highly recommend having remix mode turned on. That makes it so when you do want to create a variation, you can click B4 on this image and alter the prompt but get a similar style to the image. This is how I was able to get more consistent character with mid Journey version 6.
That was probably the biggest update for the week and if you hop on X, you’ll see all sorts of examples right now of people generating amazing images with M Journey V6 like my friend Ali jwes here who created this amazing realistic image. Here’s another really amazing realistic image. Here’s one where it actually says hello V6 on a sticky note hanging from a plant and some other really cool art. Nick St Pierre on X also has some amazing images that he generated that are just ultra realistic so it’s cool to see what people are doing with this.
Moving on this week, Microsoft announced that you can now make music directly inside of Microsoft co-pilot. They partnered with Sunno, a tool that allows you to generate songs with lyrics that are actually pretty good. This is rolling out slowly starting this week.
In order to see if you have access, you go to copilot.microsoft.com, come up to the top right and click on plugins and if you have access already you will see AO plugin here that you can turn on. If you want to use Sunno, you can still generate songs directly inside of the Sunno Discord and pop out bangers.
This week, Google research showed off video poet which is Google’s new text to video image to video video to video and even video to Audio model that they’re rolling out. You can see a handful of samples on their website of this new technology. These inputs are transformed into unique and creative outputs, making it a powerful tool for content creators and filmmakers.
Also this week, Open AI rolled out kind of a small new feature inside of Chat GPT. We now have the ability to archive old discussions making it easier to manage your conversations and keep your workspace organized.
And finally on the legal side of AI, Anthropic announced that they will offer legal protection to their customers if there’s ever any copyright issues. Under the updated terms, they will defend their customers from any copyright infringement claim made against them for their authorized use of their services or their outputs and they will pay for any approved settlements or judgments that result. The new terms go live on January 1st, 2024.
So, there you have it. Those were the major updates and announcements in the world of AI this week. It’s been a slower week, but still, there were some noteworthy developments. As the year comes to an end, I’d like to thank you for your continued support. It’s been a wild ride for this YouTube channel, and I’m truly grateful for all of you who have tuned in.
I will likely take the next week off between Christmas and New Year’s to spend time with my family, but I have some really cool videos planned for the new year. So stay tuned for that. Also, if you haven’t already, make sure you check out future tools, my website where I showcase all the cool AI tools that I come across as well as AI news. It’s a great way to stay up to date with the latest technological developments in the world of AI.
Thanks again for tuning in, I really appreciate each and every one of you. I’ll see you next year. Happy holidays and bye-bye!
