Midjourney’s AI image maker adds major new editing options to its platform, such as announced by CEO David Holz on Discord. You can edit an uploaded image using generative AI, as until now you could only do with images created by AI. This will mainly be a web-based tool, expanding on Midjourney’s Discord-focused and exclusive features.
While AI image editing tools have been around for a while, they have almost always been limited to images created with the same AI model doing the editing. Midjourney makes the move to allow you to edit an image you want to edit, rather than having the model do the initial creation.
That’s technically impressive, because it means the model has to understand more about an image it didn’t design from scratch. However, it can also be risky, as other models may have refrained from offering this as an option because they fear people using it to tamper with photos of real people without their consent or using the AI for less than benevolent purposes to use.
Once the image is uploaded, you can edit it in several ways. You can zoom in or out, adjust the angle, and otherwise play with the image without the need for Discord and with just a single command. You can also use a digital brush to paint in, which allows for more precise adjustments. The most notable new element is the Retexture feature, which lets you precisely change colors and other details while keeping the image’s shapes and objects intact.
Midjourney shapes the future
Questions about the ethics of creating and editing AI images have led to heated debates, lawsuits and other arguments. That makes Midjourney’s decisions important for how rivals and regulators come up with rules to set internally and for the industry. Midjourney has agreed to embed metadata in AI-generated images so they can always be identified, although this is not yet the more comprehensive C2PA standard. These are things that Midjourney is well aware of.
“Because these new features are so powerful, we’re going to limit their deployment to a subset of the current community and increase our human moderation over the results (there are also new, more advanced AI moderators who we think will do a great job ),” wrote Holz. “To be honest, we’re not sure how exactly we can limit the implementation of this feature, so we wanted to put out a survey and ask for your opinion. We will use these results to calculate what percentage of the user base we will reach with different limitations and try to find a balance between accessibility and volume.”
For the average user, the ability to easily manipulate images with AI could make using Midjourney more attractive and photo editing a lot easier. And as AI image makers become more common, Midjours wants to be more accessible. That’s why the company decided to give up Discord as its only outlet, even though it is still an important center for the company’s creations. Midjourney probably doesn’t want to be left out simply because some don’t want to sign up for Discord.