I am inspired by Midjourney.

If you haven’t heard yet – Midjourney is an AI image generator that requires humans to describe what they want to create. Within hours, you can create beautiful images.

I have been playing with DALL-E for a few months and making all my blog post images with an AI. You’ve seen these for months on my blogs.

But Midjourney is different because it is multiplayer. You make images in front of millions, who can take your image as a seed, and expand on it. It’s like visual improv with 2 million people. It’s a Twitter stream of beauty rather than outrage. The company is a team of 16 who have taken no funding yet – they don’t care what investors want. They want to explore augmented human goodness (read here).

Recently, I was on a call with a friend, and I showed him the power of Midjourney by asking him what he’d like to create. We described and then tweaked the word prompts together. We made images, in seconds, one after the next, until we captured what we wanted to build together. We felt the joy of cooperative imagination.

One element of Transformative Tech is human collaboration. For years, I’ve been looking for true “centaur” applications where human creativity is supported by AI. Midjourney is that, but better because we can do it together.

As I’ve been studying human emotion, I’ve been stunned by the impact of language on our ability to feel and to understand. These types of AI require that we learn to describe “better” and “clearer.” I predict it will expand our language ability as we work with more of these types of AI. Expanded language ability expands human cognition.

Coming right behind the image AIs are other AIs who code software, create film, and create music from human text prompts. We humans will need to get good at describing what we want and feel. It’s extraordinary and will expand us.

I had a dream a few months ago, I tried to communicate it to the friend who I saw in my dream, and well – the words weren’t good enough. Then I put her photo in Midjourney as a seed and was able to show her how I saw her in a dream.

This is the next wave of human and computer cooperation.
It’s the next wave of human creative collaboration.

Start playing now.

Love,
Nichol

(Photo Credit: Midjourney)

P.S.S.  Here’s the rest of the series:

• Human Syncing and Group Flow
• Humanizing the Singularity
• Six Takeaways From My Day-to-day Work
• Overview: Deep Human – Warm Up
• Build while Being
• My Core Premise
• Growth Triangle
• The Choice
• The Growth 🔼 – The Metaverse — a Growth Triangle for Billions?
• Design Principles – The Metaverse as Human Potential Tech
• The Stack
• My Origin Story — And Why We Need Human Embodiment AND Technology
• The Metaverse (and the Future of Human Intelligence)
• A New Oath to Take? Defining Modern Neurorights
• Blockchain for Transformation?
• Collaborative Capacity
• How are Paradigm Shifts a Growth Tool?