#99: Abstract Prompts

Midjourney's defaults and biases

Midjourney released a new version last month and claimed it was better at “personalization” than earlier versions. According to them, if you rank a large number of random pairs of AI images according to your likes and dislikes, Midjourney will then be able to create images based specifically on your tastes. That feature has never worked particularly well for me, perhaps because I’ve often disliked both images in the pairs they’ve asked me to rank.

Nonetheless, I decided to give the new version’s default profile a chance this week. I was surprised to learn that yes, I actually did like some of the images it produced, quite a bit in some cases. As it happened, most of my experiments used extremely abstract prompts. My prompt for the image above, for example, was simply “edge effect.”¹

The prompt I used for the man was the only one in this post that wasn’t abstract. It was someone else’s prompt referencing a musician — specifically a trumpet player — in Havana. Midjourney’s strength has always been in creating photorealistic images of people, usually beautiful young white women. So in many ways, this image cuts against its usual bias. Yet every single image created by that prompt featured an older Black man. Why? Do only older Black men play trumpet in Havana?²

The image above used another two-word prompt, “spirit collective.” I had no idea what I’d get. As it turned out, most of the images featured either all or mostly Black folks. When I changed the prompt to “angel collective,” most of the people Midjourney created were White, or very light-skinned.³ Interesting.

The image above used the same “spirit collective” prompt but I also added “día de los muertos” to it. As for the image below, I used a phrase a friend recently shared with me: “It is your essence that sustains you.”

I used the same phrase for the next image as well, only this time I added “Fibonacci sequence” to it.

And then, two other things happened. I liked Midjourney’s default profile so much that I tried to capture it as a moodboard.⁴ I also began wondering if it might be more true that “we are sustained by the light inside.”⁵

I started playing with both the new phrase and the new moodboard simultaneously. I learned that a) I might like the new moodboard even better than the default profile and b) Midjourney apparently thinks that “inside” means a door is involved.⁶

Curious? Are you interested in suggesting an abstract prompt yourself? Please comment, or reply to this email, with your suggestion.⁷ I’ll try it out and report back.

1. In the world of digital imaging, edge effects are actually frames — or effects — along the edges of images.

2. Do they get old and then take up playing trumpet? I somehow doubt it.

3. And furthermore, the vast majority of spirits and/or angels were female.

4. The moodboard’s name is currently #25. Suggestions for something more descriptive gratefully accepted.

5. I don’t actually think the concept of “truth” applies to either of these phrases; it was simply how I began thinking of a variation.

6. I have to wonder if Midjourney’s intelligence is partially feline.

7. I really doubt any of you would even consider suggesting anything off-color or hateful, but I feel compelled to mention that I’ll follow up only on phrases that would generally be considered neutral or positive.