My son in law was playing around with Midjourney v5 and I asked him to try to redo some of the images I’ve made with DALL-E 2.
Back in August i wrote a post about using DALL-E 2 to generate mnemonic images for memorizing the US presidents using the Major mnemonic system.
To memorize that Rutherford B. Hayes was the 19th president. you might visualize Hayes playing a tuba because you can encode 19 as tuba. The image I created last year was cartoonish and showed Hayes playing something more like a sousaphone than a tuba. Midjourney created a photorealistic image of Hayes playing some weird instrument which is something like a tuba.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd president. If we use an image of the moon as the peg for 32, we could imagine FDR looking up at the moon. The previous image of FDR was really creepy and looked nothing like him. The image Midjourney created with FDR was really good.
Midjourney choked on the request to create a create an image of Grover Cleveland holding an onion and a wiener dog, just as DALL-E had. It didn’t do any better substituting Grover the Muppet for Grover Cleveland.
A few weeks ago I wrote a blog post about a thought experiment involving an alien astronomer with 12 fingers working in base 12. I could only get DALL-E to draw a hint of an extra finger. We weren’t able to get Midjourney to put 12 fingers on a hand either, but we did get an interesting image of an alien astronomer.
Just to know: how many attempts did it take to get the final images?
Both DALL-E and Midjourney give you four images at a time, and you pick the one you like best of the four alternatives. If I remember correctly, the Midjourney images of Hayes and FDR were from one of the first or second attempts. If we tried more times, the final result wasn’t too different from one of the first images.
The alien astronomer took maybe 5 or 10 attempts, and none of them were really what I wanted. We never got a good image of a telescope or a hand with six fingers.
The images with Grover the Muppet were way off. The images with Grover Cleveland weren’t bad, but we couldn’t get Midjourney to make the dog a weiner dog. We tried wiener as in sausage rather than wiener as in dog, but that don’t do so well. We could get a spherical image in Cleveland’s hand, but it wasn’t clearly an onion.
The effort that went into creating the corresponding DALL-E images was comparable, except I put more effort into the DALL-E image of FDR than the Midjourney image of FDR.