Midjourney 6 Means the End for a Big Chunk of the Photo Industry

Why, and how to adapt

“With Midjourney 6, it’s now possible to rely entirely on AI images for my websites.”

Those words — spoken to me by a large independent online publisher — should strike fear into the hearts of anyone in the photography industry.

I agree with the publisher. Using Midjourney’s new Version 6 doesn’t initially feel revolutionary. But once you dig deeper, you begin to realize it’s a massive step forward for AI-generated imagery.

For a specific kind of photo, Midjourney’s output will indeed eliminate the need for human photographers. Here’s why — and how photographers must adapt.

An Impactful Lunch

AI image generators like DALL-E and Midjourney have become remarkably powerful in a remarkably short time.

I still vividly remember attending a conference for my industry trade group, the Digital Media Licensing Association, in 2019. DMLA brought in experts from big AI-focused companies like IBM and Microsoft to talk about the then-hot AI topic: automated tagging of objects in images.

The experts did indeed address that topic. But during lunch on the rooftop sundeck of the Mariott in Marina Del Rey, four of the AI panelists chose to sit together. I tagged along and listened in.

Chatting casually among themselves, these leading AI researchers and practitioners agreed on one thing: image tagging is cool, but give the tech a couple of years, and it will be generating new images based on a couple of sentences of text.

At the time, this seemed ludicrous. AI image generation was in its early, early infancy. It would still be two years before OpenAI would release the first version of DALL-E. And even when that happened, the initial output of AI image generators wasn’t exactly impressive.

As a photographer, it was easy to look at AI imagery examples like this one from 2021 and go “Nah, that’s not going to replace a human any time soon.”

Of course, the experts turned out to be completely right.

In just a few short years, AI image generators surged ahead and were generating images that rivaled real photographs in their detail, realism, and visual power.

Here’s the same (bizarre) armchair avocado prompt from the previous image, only rendered by DALL-E3 today.

We went from grainy, low-res, clipart-like images to beautiful, photorealistic renders in just under three years. It’s mind-blowing.

For certain types of images, the progress is even more remarkable. While early AI image generators were decent at creating realistic, close-up images of faces, they initially struggled to create more complex images of people that looked natural and convincing.

A simple look at the progression of people-centered images from Midjourney V1 (released in 2022) to Midjourney V5.1 (the most up-to-date version as of late 2023) illustrates how far these images have come, and how quickly.

Not Quite Real

Still, despite all the rapid progress Midjourney V5.1 images weren’t perfect — or even necessarily very usable. They gave a semblance of reality, but were often still missing crucial details.

Version 5.1, for example, struggled to render hands realistically. Famously, AI-generated images often showed people with six fingers, four fingers, or no fingers at all.

For all its power, Version 5.1 also created images that still had a somewhat cartoony look.

This image, which I created with 5.1, shows the wrong number of fingers on the person’s hand, with a weird bonus fingernail floating just below the clenched fist. The hand itself also looks too smooth — more like a drawing of a hand than the skin of an actual person.

Likewise, this photo of a lawyer researching a legal case has a velvety, anime-like look to the skin, and an overly dramatic aesthetic.

These images, in other words, look good enough to make us think — for a split second — that they might be real.

But after a second, it’s obvious that there’s something off about them. If anything, they look worse than a simple illustration or clipart image would look.

Out of the Uncanny Valley

Getting close to realistic — yet falling short — is creepier than sticking with abstraction. A semi-realistic hand with float bits of finger looks way skeevier than a cartoonish hand with the right number of digits.

In short, Midjourney 5.1’s images often fell into the infamous “Uncanny Valley.”

The Uncanny Valley was originally coined in the 1970s to describe humans’ reactions to human-like robots.

The concept is simple — humans feel increasingly connected to objects that look human, as those objects become more realistic. But at a certain point — when the object looks almost but not quite real — our love for it suddenly plummets off a cliff.

It’s why we find characters like the Powerpuff Girls or Maggie Simpson cute, while we find uber-realistic Victorian-era children’s dolls creepy enough to create a whole horror movie franchise from them.

Human-like objects with exaggerated, stylized features feel friendly and lovable. Objects that come dangerously close to looking human — yet fall flat — feel horrific and macabre.

The most interesting thing about the uncanny valley, though, is that there’s a clear way out. Once the realism of a non-human object gets just a bit higher, we go back to loving the object. In fact, we love it a lot.

Think of the cherished, human-like characters in today’s most realistic animated films. Anna and Elsa from Frozen or Moana from (surprise) Moana look real enough that they don’t trigger feelings of horror or unease.

If anything, they reflect our humanness back to us in a way that feels a bit more real than reality, exaggerating qualities we like (big smiles, large eyeballs) and creating an instant feeling of connection.

Midjourney Rises

While Midjourney 5.1 was stuck in the depths of the uncanny valley, Midjourney 6 rises dramatically out of it.

Again, the differences between 5.1 and 6 images can feel subtle at first — especially for more abstract or artistic prompts. Ask the systems to make a photo of a bowl of soup, and both will do an admirable job.

But ask the two systems to generate the kinds of images that people actually buy and use — namely, aspirational images of people — and the results look dramatically different.

Here’s that remote control photo again, but made with Midjourney 6 this time.

The remote still looks a bit wonky. But the hand itself looks far better. For starters, it has the right number of fingers. But the skin texture and the details on the cuticles are much more realistic.

We can even see tiny details — like minute hairs on the top of the thumb, visible in the glow of the distant TV — that scream “human” to our brains.

The lawyer image is even more dramatic. The anime-like quality of the 5.1 version is totally gone. Instead, we get an image that 99% of viewers would mistake for real.

As with Anna and Elsa, Midjourney V6’s images look even a bit better than real images. Our pretend lawyer is a handsome dude!

His perfectly coiffed hair and smooth skin would be hard to achieve in a real photo shoot, without the help of a skilled makeup department.

While the background of the V5.1 image looked like Hogwarts, the V6 image has a tasteful, blurred background of hefty-looking lawbooks. If this image was in the brochure for a law school, we’d probably feel compelled to go there.

In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve discovered in my own experiments with using Midjourney V6 images in advertising campaigns. Midjourney’s aspirational images of people convert better than images of real people. Customers can’t get enough of them.

Get Ready

This presents a huge problem for people who make a living creating simple, aspirational photos of people.

Hiring a model, renting a law library (or building a fake one in a studio), purchasing wardrobe, installing appropriate lighting, and buying pro camera gear is expensive, and takes weeks.

Conjuring up a fake lawyer with AI costs nothing at all, and takes about 15 seconds.

Given a choice between an expensive and labor-intensive photoshoot and AI, most customers seeking a stock image will choose the latter option, as my publisher friend’s comment suggests.

Before, Midjourney’s subtle errors made the system’s human-focused images essentially unusable. Now, they may not be perfect, but they’re good enough.

And in a commercial space, “good enough” always wins.

So what does that mean for photographers? If your career is built around creating or selling staged stock photos using actors and sets, it’s time to reevaluate your business model.

For now, Midjourney is held back by its wonky interface, which requires downloading a gamer-focused chat app and sending command-line messages to a bot that replies with images.

As the system’s technical hurdles fall away, though — and more user-friendly image generators like DALL-E advance — images like those from V6 will suddenly be everywhere.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean the end of commercial photography. But it does mean changes. Here’s what I expect:

• The price of traditional stock-style images will continue its long march towards $0
• Given how well they convert, advertisers will lean into the use of AI imagery
• Editorial images, which are used in newspapers, magazines, and many books, will surge in value. These images are taken by photographers (like me) who follow stringent rules about veracity and accuracy. In a world inundated with fake AI images, the authenticity of editorial photos will become an even hotter commodity for a certain type of customer.
• A niche will continue to exist for human-created commercial stock imagery, as some brands will never embrace AI. But the niche will be small, and dominated by big-name photographers or photographers with deep, existing connections to brands.
• Photos taken of specific events in the real world will remain valuable, or even increase in value. No one wants an AI-generated wedding photo. Event photographers can breathe easy.

AI image generators have advanced dramatically in a fantastically short time, but their subtle mistakes limited their real-world impact.

Today, these systems are clawing their way out of the uncanny valley, one avocado chair or dapper lawyer at a time. Photography will never be the same.

I’ve tested thousands of ChatGPT prompts over the last year. As a full-time creator, there are a handful I come back to every day. I compiled them into a free guide, 7 Enormously Useful ChatGPT Prompts For Creators. Grab a copy today!