Midjourney Founder David Holz On The Impact Of AI On Art, Imagination And The Creative Economy

Midjourney is one of the leading drivers of the emerging technology of using artificial intelligence (AI) to create visual imagery from text prompts. The San Francisco-based startup recently made news as the engine behind the artwork that won an award in a Colorado state fair competition, and that's unlikely to be the last complicated issue that AI art will face in the coming years. Midjourney differentiates from others in the space by emphasizing the painterly aesthetics in the images it produces. The platform is not trying to create photorealistic images that can be mistaken for photographs, and CEO David Holz says he is personally very uneasy with the uncanny quality of deepfakes and other work that simulates reality too closely. Instead, Holz says Midjourney is designed to unlock the creativity of ordinary people by giving them tools to make beautiful pictures just by describing them.