# Midjourney

> A small AI lab whose service turns a written description into an image.

- Level: Basic
- Topics: Tech companies, AI
- URL: https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/midjourney/
- In Spanish: [Midjourney](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/es/midjourney/)

**Midjourney** is a San Francisco research lab founded by David Holz, who had previously co-founded Leap Motion, a company that made hand-tracking sensors. Its product, also called Midjourney, is an image generator: you write a description, a **prompt** such as "an old lighthouse in a storm, oil painting", and within seconds you get several images that did not exist before.

Under the hood it uses a **diffusion model**, trained on a huge collection of images paired with their descriptions. It starts from random visual noise and removes it step by step, guided by your words, until a picture appears. Midjourney shows a grid of four options; you pick one to enlarge, ask for variations, or change the wording and try again.

It opened to the public in 2022, at first only through Discord, a chat app, where you typed commands such as `/imagine` in shared channels; a web app came later. It is paid by subscription, and the company is known for being small and funded by its own revenue rather than by big investors. It also sits at the center of the debate about AI and art: an image made with it won a fine arts competition at the Colorado State Fair in 2022, and it has been sued by artists and by film studios who argue it was trained on their work without permission.

## An analogy

A tireless illustrator who has seen millions of pictures. You describe what you want in a sentence, they sketch four versions in seconds, and you point at one and say "more like this".

## Keep in mind

- Turns text prompts into images using a diffusion model.
- Founded by David Holz; launched publicly in 2022, first on Discord.
- Subscription only; known for being small and self-funded.
- Faces lawsuits over training on artists' and studios' work without permission.

## Go deeper

- [Midjourney (official site)](https://www.midjourney.com/)
- [Midjourney documentation](https://docs.midjourney.com/)
- [Midjourney on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midjourney)

## Related terms

- [Sensor](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/sensor/): A component that measures something in the physical world and turns it into a signal.
- [Text-to-image](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/text-to-image/): AI that draws a brand-new picture from a written description.
- [Prompt](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/prompt/): Everything you send to an AI model: the question, the instructions, the context.
- [Diffusion model](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/diffusion-model/): An image generator that starts from random noise and cleans it up, step by step.
- [Discord](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/discord/): An app for online communities to chat by text, voice and video in shared spaces.
- [Artificial intelligence](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/artificial-intelligence/): Getting computers to do things that, until recently, only people could do.
- [Training and inference](https://tidbit.legios.com.ar/training-and-inference/): Training builds the model once; inference is using it, millions of times a day.