Midjourney, one of many first AI-based picture mills on the net, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a yr.
Dubbed V7, the mannequin started rolling out in alpha round midnight EST on Thursday, comes per week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that rapidly went viral for its means to create Ghibli-style photographs.
Midjourney’s just isn’t a Ghibli-optimized mannequin, although — at the least not formally — nevertheless it nonetheless can generate aesthetically pleasing works, at the least to this reporter’s dilettante eye.
We’re now starting the alpha-test section of our new V7 picture Mannequin. It’s our smartest, most lovely, most coherent mannequin but. Give it a shot and count on updates each week or two for the subsequent two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7
— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025
To make use of it, you’ll first should charge round 200 photos to construct a Midjourney “personalization” profile, in the event you haven’t already. This profile tunes the mannequin to your particular person visible preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first mannequin to have personalization switched on by default.
When you’ve executed that, you’ll be capable of flip V7 on or off on Midjourney’s web site and, in the event you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the net app, you’ll be able to rapidly choose the mannequin from the drop-down menu subsequent to the “model” label.
Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a “completely completely different structure” in a put up on X.
“V7 is […] a lot smarter with textual content prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look implausible, picture high quality is noticeably increased with lovely textures, and our bodies, arms, and objects of all types have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”
V7 is accessible in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Chill out, and powers a brand new software known as Draft Mode that renders photos at 10x the velocity and half the price of the usual mode. Draft photos are of decrease high quality than standard-mode photos, however they are often enhanced and re-rendered with a click on.
Numerous customary Midjourney options aren’t out there but for V7, based on Holz, together with picture upscaling and retexturing. These will arrive within the close to future, he mentioned, presumably inside two months.
“That is a completely new mannequin with distinctive strengths and possibly a couple of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e need to be taught from you what it’s good and dangerous at, however undoubtedly consider it might require completely different kinds of prompting. So mess around a bit.”
In my transient testing, V7 adhered fairly properly to my prompts, although I didn’t have time to actually put the mannequin by means of the ringer.
Midjourney is an uncommon operation. Began in 2022 by Holz, who co-founded PC peripheral firm Leap Movement, it hasn’t raised a dime of out of doors cash.
In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly anticipating to usher in round $200 million in income. Just lately, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned it was establishing a {hardware} workforce to work on some initiatives that it didn’t element, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object technology.
The corporate is going through a number of lawsuits that accuse it of infringing on the rights of thousands and thousands of artists by coaching AI instruments on photos scraped from the online with out the consent of the pictures’ creators.