Midjourney, one of many first AI-based picture mills on the internet, has launched its first new AI picture mannequin in practically a 12 months.
Dubbed V7, the mannequin started rolling out in alpha round midnight EST on Thursday, comes per week after OpenAI debuted a brand new picture generator in ChatGPT that shortly went viral for its capability to create Ghibli-style pictures.
Midjourney’s isn’t a Ghibli-optimized mannequin, although — a minimum of not formally — however it nonetheless can generate aesthetically pleasing works, a minimum of to this reporter’s dilettante eye.
We’re now starting the alpha-test part of our new V7 picture Mannequin. It’s our smartest, most lovely, most coherent mannequin but. Give it a shot and anticipate updates each week or two for the following two months. pic.twitter.com/Ogqt0fgiY7
— Midjourney (@midjourney) April 4, 2025
To make use of it, you’ll first need to charge round 200 pictures to construct a Midjourney “personalization” profile, in the event you haven’t already. This profile tunes the mannequin to your particular person visible preferences; V7 is Midjourney’s first mannequin to have personalization switched on by default.
When you’ve achieved that, you’ll be capable to flip V7 on or off on Midjourney’s web site and, in the event you’re a member of Midjourney’s Discord server, on its Discord chatbot. Within the internet app, you’ll be able to shortly choose the mannequin from the drop-down menu subsequent to the “model” label.
Midjourney CEO David Holz described V7 as a “completely totally different structure” in a put up on X.
“V7 is […] a lot smarter with textual content prompts,” Holz continued in an announcement on Discord. “[I]mage prompts look incredible, picture high quality is noticeably larger with lovely textures, and our bodies, palms, and objects of all types have considerably higher coherence on all particulars.”
V7 is accessible in two flavors, Turbo (costlier to run) and Calm down, and powers a brand new instrument known as Draft Mode that renders pictures at 10x the velocity and half the price of the usual mode. Draft pictures are of decrease high quality than standard-mode pictures, however they are often enhanced and re-rendered with a click on.
A lot of normal Midjourney options aren’t accessible but for V7, in keeping with Holz, together with picture upscaling and retexturing. These will arrive within the close to future, he mentioned, probably inside two months.
“That is a completely new mannequin with distinctive strengths and doubtless a couple of weaknesses” Holz wrote on Discord. “[W]e need to be taught from you what it’s good and dangerous at, however undoubtedly be mindful it might require totally different kinds of prompting. So mess around a bit.”
In my temporary testing, V7 adhered moderately nicely to my prompts, although I didn’t have time to actually put the mannequin by the ringer.
Midjourney is an uncommon operation. Began in 2022 by Holz, who co-founded PC peripheral firm Leap Movement, it hasn’t raised a dime of outdoor cash.
In late 2023, Midjourney was reportedly anticipating to herald round $200 million in income. Not too long ago, the San Francisco-based agency mentioned it was establishing a {hardware} workforce to work on some initiatives that it didn’t element, and it continues to coach beforehand introduced fashions for video and 3D object era.
The corporate is going through a number of lawsuits that accuse it of infringing on the rights of tens of millions of artists by coaching AI instruments on pictures scraped from the online with out the consent of the photographs’ creators.
