Midjourney AI
Midjourney is an AI-based image generation software that can be used to make everything ranging from professional stock images to elaborate and bizarre digital art. The Handbuilt City has used it for a number of editorial illustrations, and it continues to be a fun tool to play around with. The US Copyright Office has ruled that digital images made using these artificial intelligence products cannot be copyrighted because they aren’t technically original works, although the question of the degree to which this will hold true given the proliferation of the technology, is yet unresolved.
Articles I’ve written on Midjourney specifically:
October 3rd, 2023: Midjourney Parameters: Style and Chaos in Speculative Urbanism
July 3rd, 2023: Unpacking AI Training Biases in Midjourney
May 23rd, 2023: Dreaming In Isometric: Variations on Midjourney Prompts, a.k.a. Tokamak Variations
May 23rd, 2023: Midjourney: The Imagination of the Sane, the Insane, and the Unseen
April 27th, 2023: I asked Midjourney To Imagine The Ideal City. It Was… Weird.
March 10th, 2023: Midjourney AI: Escaping Down The Rabbit Hole
Midjourney Content
As writing about urbanism in Michigan is enough to drive one absolutely insane, I have been spending some more time messing around in Midjourney to create series of various images.
Rust Belt Christmas. December 2023.
Midcentury corporate interiors. July 2023.
Agricultural futurism. June 2023.
Industrial futurism. June 2023.
A dog-friendly Ayahuasca retreat in South America. June 2023.
Tokamak Reactor Variations. May 2023.
The Sane, the Insane, and the Unseen: Midjourney Struggling To Render Basic Electrical Equipment. May 2023.
Other AI content
In July 2023, I wrote about some of the weirder elements of language processing that go into a large language model like ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI. I also wrote this article on a lawsuit against OpenAI, which raises important legal and ethical questions about AI training. This article, meanwhile, considers a question perhaps corollary to the so-called Dead Internet Theory, which postulates that a huge percentage of all internet traffic comprises things like bots and AI instead of real human transactions. I have noticed a precipitous drop in ad revenue while noticing an increase in traffic on this website in recent years, both human traffic and bot traffic. Using artificial intelligence to crawl the entire web– or to write truly horrific quality copy- is certain to have unfortunate effects on content distribution, media, and more.
The Handbuilt City AI Content Policy
The Handbuilt City has been using artificial intelligence in the production of creative collateral since the spring of 2023. We are committed to transparency in the use of AI, which we think has great potential– but also poses risks and threats. We do not use AI to write copy (mostly because the copy it writes is, as of spring 2024, at least, garbage) but we do use ChatGPT to assist with things like research outlines or to extract information from more text-heavy research.