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The painterly image above was one of four generated in about a minute by Midjourney, an artificial intelligence that creates images based on prompts you give it. You can find Midjourney on Discord and put it to work for free at discord.gg/midjourney or start out at Midjourney.com. The prompt for the image above was “/imagine mars will send no more”, the title of this blog.

Below is a variation on the prompt “/imagine calico cats become space pirates and conquer the moon in the future”. It looks to me like a vintage science-fiction book cover, but painted on drugs.

If I had known about Midjourney a month ago, I probably would have used it for cover art to Permanent Crescent. The only drawback is that copyright doesn’t seem applicable to A.I.-generated imagery, at least according to this month’s article in The Register, which features Midjourney’s founder.

Below is a result of the prompt “/imagine alien dragonfly attacks a space colony”. Truly trippy!

I’d never used Discord before today, but I’ve been curious about trying A.I. Art platforms and saw some amazing Midjourney renders this week on Reddit. You can get about 25 renders before needing to pay for a Midjourney subscription, and you are basically producing them in an open chat room. On the one hand, that’s a little annoying because there are dozens of people using the robot all at once, so it is hard to keep track of your images while new messages are entering the chat every couple of seconds. On the other hand, it’s fascinating to see what everyone else is conjuring with the robot. (A paid subscription allows you to invite the robot to your own chat room so you can work with it one-on-one.)

My renders for “/imagine giant space wasps attacking people on an asteroid” looked cool but not at all like wasps. However, I was impressed with the results for “/imagine telepathic space octopuses controlling the brains of dinosaurs“!

I used up all the images from my free trial, but I will return to play more with Midjourney. Below is a gallery of the stuff it made for me today in about an hour based on the five prompts I’ve shared with you.

Note that these are “upscaled” versions. The first thing Midjourney does is make a set of four low-resolution images, which you can then instruct it to “upscale” individually to get more detail and greater resolution, or you can tell it to create “variations” of any of the originals (which can also then be upscaled). You also have an option to “upscale to the max”, which means even higher resolution.