People appearing in places they never were? History may as well be rewritten and more with the latest feature from a popular AI art generator.
You can do some pretty crazy things with artificial intelligence trained models, and lately the tech is letting you do even more.
Updates to the image creation platform Midjourney that’s like Disneyland for your imagination have rolled out, and they do some pretty interesting things, not only evolving the model to look even more realistic and match what you’re suggesting, but also adding a form of “outpainting” by letting you zoom out from a concocted image.
Previously, Midjourney would have you create an image out of nothing using only text, with the prompt displaying four results, and having you upscale or create variations on one or each.
While that is still the case, now you can upscale and then zoom out, not only allowing you to have the system create more of a landscape around the image, but also change how it works, remixing and adding to your prompt by adding more text and varying your prompt.
The results are crazy, and venture into the world where working out just what is real can get difficult to decipher. So much, in fact, that you might be able to create history from nothing with photos that never happened.
By the time Miles Davis had died in 1991, this writer and photographer was but a young kid, so there’s no way he would have been carrying a camera to capture the iconic jazz musician, let alone with the skill needed to carry a half-kilo 85mm portraiture lens and body (which would have been on a film camera back then).
And yet using Midjourney, that is entirely possible.
We started with this prompt and found two images we loved:
Miles Davis playing trumpet on stage at Jazz Fest, Nikon 85mm f1. 4, black and white, ilford 800
And from there, you simply need to upscale the ones you want and then “zoom out” from each one, as Midjourney comes up with variations on the surrounding imagery that its AI model is processing.
Each time, the results are just remarkable, and not long after, you may find a result that looks exactly like what you were after, almost like Midjourney had tapped into an alternate universe where these images were entirely real and possible.
It’s a fake photo and totally fictional, but remarkable all the same.
In testing Midjourney’s zooming creation, we’ve found that while you can technically perform lots of zooms, you may find other things get created inside of them that don’t match. Some of our zooms ended up creating brass instruments that simply don’t exist, looking like elongated pipes or even drums that more resembled kegs than instruments.
Still overall, it’s an impressive result, and could see fictional photos blurring the line between reality and fiction very, very soon.
