Setting up Discord to use Midjourney
Confusing at first, but pretty powerful once you get started
Welcome to ai4biz, my exploration of generative AI. I’m trying to find my way through the explosion of hype and activity around generative AI through analysis and experimentation. I hope you can get something out of it too.
Last time, I had a look at three of the big visual AI generators, DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Image Creator. I have always liked the images that people have created with Midjourney and wanted to explore that system in some more depth, find out how much control and repeatability you can have in image creation. In order to do that, I have to walk through the process of getting setup in Discord to access Midjourney.
When you go to the Midjourney site, you get this remarkably old school ASCII style animation, which, I have to say is pretty cool. Playing with this AI stuff feels just like the early days of personal computers where you would try things out without fully understanding and the results would always surprise you. I enjoy that nostalgic feeling.
So hit Get Started at the bottom there and you end up on the documentation site and ultimately, the Quick Start Guide. Which is great, but you already need Discord. So HOLD ON and go to Discord.com and install the client on your computer. You should install it on your phone too as using it across all your tech is pretty cool.
Follow the instructions to install Discord and make an account. This can be an existing account if you are already a Discord user. Once that is all set up, go back to the Quick Start Guide for Midjourney. This is pretty straightforward, just put your Discord window beside the guide and work your way through.
Once you are all set up, you are basically chatting with a Midjourney bot that is making images for you when you type the prompt:
/imagine prompt: <whatever you type>
The wild thing is that you are creating in a chat channel with a bunch of other people. This can be very confusing or overwhelming at first. But it is also very cool! You get to see other people prompting and refining. You can just watch and learn. It is like being surrounded by a group of people who are sharing their techniques in real time.
So I can just roll up and down to see different styles and prompts and ideas. The prompt on this screen just used a snippet of the rhyme and added some modifiers for period, painting style and more. It is fun to try some of the prompts to see how similar (or different) they turn out each time.
Final thoughts:
Go ahead and get setup and try out Midjourney. It is a little more effort than Microsoft’s Image Creator, which is probably the easiest of the bunch. Try images, see what others are doing and play around. The images on Midjourney tend towards detailed and interesting.
Where to Next on ai4biz?
There are a lot of settings on Midjourney that we will explore in the coming posts. But the constant scrolling of new posts drives me crazy when I am trying to do a specific task, so next time we will set up our own Discord server and invite the Midjourney bot. This makes the creation process a great deal more focused. See you then!