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.

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! In April 2022, OpenAI -- the artificial intelligence (AI) company cofounded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman -- debuted DALL-E 2, an AI tool that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language, like "teddy bears working on new AI research on the moon in the 1980s," for instance. In an attempt to take a step toward artificial general intelligence (AGI) by rendering it with the sense of sight, OpenAI created an internet sensation. In the company's words, "DALL-E 2 will empower people to express themselves creatively."