The Differences Between Dall-E and MidJourney

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I was very fortunate to get access to two very powerful text-to-image AIs within a short period of time. I had been on MidJourney for a few weeks before my email to join OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 platform arrived. I honestly forgot I even applied to Dall-E so it was a very pleasant surprise.

Dall-E 2 is a much more powerful AI. It produces incredibly detailed renderings that could easily be confused with real life images. The accuracy is quite stunning and frightening at the same time.

Unicorn Loafers generated by Dall-E 2

While experimenting with different prompts, I decided to try the same prompt in both systems to see what images they would produce. From these experiments, I got the impression that MidJourney produces more abstract renderings whereas Dall-E is more literal. When using a single word prompt, like “nothing”, MidJourney produced images that invoked the emotion or demonstrated what the meaning of the word was; whereas Dall-E produced images that were literal examples of the word.

Dall-E rendering “nothing”
MidJourney rendering “nothing”

As you can see above, the differences are distinct. I know the AI’s were trained on different models, but with working with them it is important to know where their strengths lie.

If I want to create an incredibly realistic looking literal thing I will use Dall-E. If I want more abstract, concept art style rendering, I will use MidJourney to complete that task. Not to say either cannot produces images like the other, but I’ve found them to just be stronger at one thing and suit very different purposes.

My Journey with AI

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The start of my journey into AI art starts with getting into digital glitch art. Back round April, I decided to take a leap into the realm of digital glitch art. I had been doing digital photography for a few years taking pictures at the local open Jam and being hired by a few artists to do promotional work. Glitch art really caught my attention and I dove as deep as I could into the community with ending up on Rob Sheridan’s Discord server.

He was making several posts about the Volstof Institute and talked about how it was made with an AI called MidJourney. I quickly signed up for the beta and within a few weeks I received the invite to the Discord server and I was on my way to exploring the possibilities that await. I received access in late May

It was like drinking from a fire hose. There was so much happening on the Discord with people collaborating and all of us figuring out how to use it. My first images were kinda meh, but I started to get an understanding of how best to use MidJourney and get the results I want.

Early attempt at generating

After getting to know MidJourney better and turn out the renderings I was looking for, the usefulness and just how powerful MidJourney was came to light. Probably one of the strongest use cases for these text-to-image AI’s is to rapidly prototype and produce concept art. The renderings from MidJourney are rarely perfect, but they are able to capture the style and concept trying to be expressed. This technology is incredibly powerful and will change this industry fundamentally.