How to Use Midjourney: Integrating AI Generated Images on Your Website
I've always struggled to find the right kind of images to incorporate into my overall website and blog posts. I could always use stock photography, but it's easy to notice the lack of authenticity when doing so. Midjourney saves you time and costs from premium stock photos when it comes to getting the right image that fits your brand.
How to Get Started with Midjourney
Step 1. Register for Discord
Getting started with Midjourney is a little different if you have never used Discord before. Discord is an instant messaging platform, and it will be the first thing that you'll need to register for before you get started, as Midjourney is entirely done in the Midjourney Discord channel.
Step 2. Join the Midjourney Beta
Go to Midjourney and click on the "Join the beta" button. This will take you through the steps to get access.
You can start using Midjourney with their limited free trial to get a feel for how this all works. The thing that you need to be aware of is that you must have at least a paid membership in order to utilize the photos for general commercial use. There are different tiered plans you can check out based on your usage. For me, the basic plan is enough to cover all of my needs plus a lot of leftover for experimentation and self-study on Midjourney's AI development progress.
Step 3. Getting Started with Midjourney
When you're getting started, Midjourney has a write-up with a few tips on how to generate your first few images.
After joining one of the newbie chats, what you will quickly realize is the chat moves fast, and you might get a little lost between your prompts and others'. To circumvent this, reduce the noise, and have your own place to organize all your prompts, you would want to create your own Midjourney server.
Step 4. How to Create Your Own Midjourney Server
The following steps were a little tricky for me, so hopefully, this helps some people.
Hit the plus (+) sign on the left navigation to Add a Server.
Select "Create My Own"
Select "For me and my friends"
Name it whatever you want and click Create.
All the way on the top left, select Direct Messages.
You will see the Midjourney Bot under your Direct Messages. Right-click on it and select Profile.
Click on Add to Server
Select the server you created earlier and hit Continue
Authorize and go back to the server you created. You should now be able to do Midjourney prompts.
Step 5. Example Midjourney Prompts for Creating AI-Generated Images on Your Website
Midjourney is continually improving its models, which affects the style, detail, and quality of the images generated. At the time of this writing, version 5 was the latest model. Each version has its own flavor, so it helps to understand the differences between models, which Midjourney details here.
Midjourney version 5 is the first version in which Midjourney has implemented a language model of
sorts, which means it's better to use a prompt as a sentence rather than using single word prompts separated by commas. It's worth it for you to understand all the different parameters Midjourney understands to go along with your prompt to get the best generated image.
Below are some example Midjourney Prompts I used to generate hero images for all of my blog posts:
As you can see, consistently framed prompts yield consistent results, perfectly viable for the style and mood of what I'm going for on this blog.
Conclusion
Text-to-image AI generators are improving at an extraordinary pace. I predict that we will see many companies embracing this AI trend and replacing all of their assets with their own generated images to make them unique. I hope I never have to see that same generic customer service stock photo ever again. With tools like Midjourney, finding the right kind of images for your website and blog posts becomes a breeze, saving time and costs while also maintaining authenticity.
