Since its release, every day, around a lakh people on the internet use Midjourney, the AI art generating tool for the first time. But the fame is fading out dramatically. The first major impact came when the platform stopped free trials. Another reason for the loss of fame is that the platform is not intuitive to use as it can only be accessed through Discord. The task of jumping through all the hoops from ‘getting Discord, joining the beta, signing up, and then landing on the Discord server’ is repelling for users. 

It’s been more than a year since the launch of Midjourney and the tool still does not give users the option like others to directly sign up, pay, prompt and get results. Users have long sought a custom UX with a prompt builder along with pull-down menus (to choose style, render quality, etc.). 

While users were trying to ease the pain-in-neck process on Midjourney through bots, a few former Googlers noticed the uncharted territory. 

This month, the team introduced Ideogram AI, a text-to-image tool similar to Midjourney. 

While the market is already dominated by Midjourney, Adobe’s Firefly, and OpenAI’s Dalle-2, et al. users claim Ideogram’s model has reliable text generation, which could give the new entrant an edge for generating logos. In fact, Ideogram’s ‘superfast powerful brain going to the right’ logo was also generated by the platform!

Nevin Thomas, creative head at AIM experiments with such AI tools regularly. His LinkedIn post based on his latest experiment with Ideogram reads, “Where one AI tool fails another shines! #Midjourney is miles better than Ideogram (at this stage at least) when it comes to generating images from text prompts but Ideogram seems to be ahead when it comes to putting text on the image.” He prompted Midjourney and Ideogram with the same text description — Astronauts at a space station holding a sign that says, “WE ARE HERE”, photo. 

The result shows a startling difference between the two AI-powered platforms in understanding the prompts. Moreover, Ideogram runs in the browser and directly integrates social media features making it easier for users like Thomas to explore tools alike. 

Developed by three former Google research scientists — Chitwan Saharia, William Chan, and Jonathan Ho, who have worked on the tech goliath’s AI projects such as Imagen, Google’s own text-to-image system. The team launched the platform backed by A16z and others with $16.5m in seed financing to develop state-of-the-art tools. 

The (Legal) Rabbit Hole

Artificial intelligence has been having a tryst with art for quite some time. From restoring Klimt’s legendary ‘Trio’ to Midjourney’s game-changing generative AI fill the art-tech community has come a long way within a few years. While AI art has encouraged users to create 15+ billion images within months, the tools are constantly being raised fingers at by ethicists and art connoisseurs. 

For instance, Sarah Andersen, Kelly McK­er­nan, and Karla Ortiz dragged Midjourney, Deviant Art and Stability.AI to court for using their work without consent. Even though the heap of accusations has been lengthening, the laws are in favour of these tools. 

As a result, people like David Holz, founder of Midjourney “don’t really wanna be involved in” the plagiarism issues that haunt the internet. Pointing at his relaxed view on data theft, John Oliver quipped, saying, “I am not really surprised. He looks like hipster Willy Wonka answering a question on whether importing Oompa Loompas makes him a slave owner.”

While all sorts of thorny legal questions are being raised at these dreamy art generators, Adobe is confident that its Firefly won’t breach any copyright laws. The design software provider is so sure that it guarantees to compensate businesses if they’re sued for infringement over any image its tool creates.

For its part, Ideogram states that it has a focus on creativity with a “high standard for trust and safety.” The latest contender has become successful overnight as users are already testing typography with its skills. Moreover, OpenAI’s Andrej Karpathy and Cohere’s co-founder Nick Frosst are some of the first followers of the tool’s social media page. While the tool has just gotten into the hands of users, we wait to see how long it works in Ideogram’s favour.