Text-to-Image, AI-Generated Art

 
Rendering of a mixed-use building in the Eugene Downtown Riverfront development (image generated by Midjourney).

I’m super busy as work deadlines loom, so this weekend’s blog entry will be brief:  I’m slow to recognize and keep up with the latest technology, industry developments, and societal trends. A case in point is my discovery of text-to-image tools, specifically the Midjourney AI-powered art generator. Seemingly out of the blue, fantastical and often dream-like imagery has flooded my social media feeds. Always late to the party, I learned Midjourney and other similar platforms are the latest online rage.
 
Friends started posting their AI-generated images on Facebook a few weeks ago. Twitter too became awash in AI-generated art. The July/August print issue of The Architect’s Newspaper published a report entitled “Midjourney Madness” questioning whether the fact artificial intelligence can now make convincing images of buildings is a good thing.
 
I decided I needed to see for myself what I could do with Midjourney. The only input required is to type in words describing whatever you can imagine.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater as interpreted by Vincent van Gogh.

A brilliant, successful, award-winning architect as a Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero.

Downtown Eugene, Oregon in 2050.

Sunrise over a Martian settlement designed by Antoni Gaudi.

The University of Oregon Ducks football team winning the 2023 National Championship.

Using Midjourney is fun, but as you can see here, my results were mixed. None of the images came close to what I’d expected to see. The “Downtown Eugene, Oregon in 2050” output was especially disappointing since hardly anything about it is recognizably Eugene. On the other hand, the “Sunrise over a Martian settlement designed by Antoni Gaudi” image is undeniably cool.
 
Midjourney operates as a bot within Discord (a social networking/chat app), so you must have a Discord account to use it. I was a total newbie to Discord; I consequently stumbled about and struggled to keep up with the Midjourney feed and even locate my work (the Discord timeline continually pushes newly generated results to the end).
 
Midjourney currently remains in beta form, and limits free use to the production of 25 images. If you want to do more, there is either a $10/month membership for 200 images per month, or $30/month for unlimited use.
 
If you’re interested in trying Midjourney, I strongly recommend reading PC World’s highly useful primer. I wish I had read the primer before setting up a Discord account and starting my free Midjourney trial. I probably wasted at least half of my 25 free images by inadvertently clicking on the wrong prompts multiple times.
 
Not to be a wet blanket about AI art generators like Midjourney, but I think it will be a while yet before a similar technology becomes a truly useful tool in the work architects do. Yes, computer algorithms can “learn” from past examples of buildings people consider beautiful and practical, but the AI is limited to processes defined by algorithmic parameters set by mere human beings. For now, architecture is too complex an undertaking—too problematical—for us to either worry about or celebrate the imminent arrival of our new computer overlords.