I’ve been on a phenomenal journey of exploration, going down command-based art generation.

When you first go into the discord server for Midjourney you’re immediately confronted by a ton of people all writing the maddest things that can come to their minds.

Then you start to see that there are a few images and collections coming through the mists of madness and people have started to curate their thoughts and hone them into more refined visions using the prompt line.

The thing that came to me is that there is no skill involved. Just your own imagination.

Imagination that needs some help admittedly, you need a little time to put your words in the right order and tweak them slightly to offer a tiny variance in the image and shape it into something wonderful. Of course, there is a little luck involved. I, for instance, haven’t had much luck with DALL-E but much more so with Midjourney but that's just artistic preference. Needless to say that this is all done with words. WORDS! Which is something truly amazing.

It’s a little like the epoch of the smartphone camera for photography. This put photography in the pockets of lots of people, then millions of people and now almost all the world has the ability to take photos at any given moment, fully democratising the photographic industry and making giving it almost no barrier to entry and allowing everyone to see if they had the ability to take a good photograph. This coupled with the addition of mass social media adoption on that very same device meant that people could share their newly found talents with anyone and everyone.

I see these AI art bots as enabling the masses, that can’t afford the time to master a given artistic medium be it watercolour or master oil or hyper-realism, the ability to try and create something that they can have some sense of ownership on.

Please don’t get me wrong, I think that those who have mastered their art form should be lauded for their dedication. No matter your opine views on the subject of people’s art, you can’t help but admire the skill involved in the creation of mastered art forms. Long may it live and may it never cease to be a journey people take.

However, this is fun and interesting! If you’re willing to invest a tiny bit of time from your chosen life path and play with your words, and your creations and enjoy your time using this tool, some wonderful art can be made by just about anyone.