Midjourney released its External Editor on Thursday, “a powerful new tool for unleashing your imagination.” Available to select users, the AI tool will enable users to upload their own images, then adjust, modify and retexture them in a wide variety of artistic styles.
Previously, users could upload a reference image to Midjourney, either through the alpha web app or its discord server, then have the generation model use that as a reference to create a new image. You could not, however, make any edits to the source image itself. That’s changing with the new External Editor. With it, you’ll be able to add, modify, move, resize, remove, and restore specific assets within the image, as well as reskin it as a whole in an entirely new style — shifting it from, say, a photograph to pointillism to impressionist to anime. The system reportedly works on doodles and line drawings as well.
The new tool is not rolling out to everybody just yet. “To maintain the same moderation standards we’ve set across Midjourney,” the company wrote in its announcement blog, it is only making it available to users who have subscribed to its service for a year or more, or who have generated 10,000 or more images through the Midjourney platform — essentially, its most loyal customers.
This policy will hopefully prevent a flood of copyright-infringing generations like we saw with the release of xAI’s Grok 2. Although, one user, Halim Alrasihi, has already went ahead to race-swap a model in an image using the External Editor, highlighting the fact that it’s nearly impossible to control AI-generated imagery
You will also, of course, have to meet the site’s age requirements, as well as “follow all applicable laws, our Community Guidelines, and other policies.” The company also reserves the right to remove content at its discretion and warns that, “you will likely encounter friction with our moderation — seemingly innocent prompts may be blocked by our filters.”
Midjourney founder David Holz also noted in a message on the company’s Discord server that “all of these things are very new, and we want to give the community and human moderation staff time to ease into it gently …”
Users have already begun publishing their edited works online, with examples that are as impressive as they are troubling. Dreaming Tulpa, for example, used it to retexture the Mona Lisa in various gothic styles — that’s “gothic” as in Hot Topic mall goth, not the period of artistic and architectural innovation in Europe lasting from the 14th to the 16th centuries.
yesterday was the last day reality could be discerned from fiction. i hope you made the most of it! pic.twitter.com/TtPjTn8zjD
— near (@nearcyan) October 23, 2024
Another user, near, conversely, used it to replace a cake with a stack of GPUs in an image of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, bragging that, “yesterday was the last day reality could be discerned from fiction. i [sic] hope you made the most of it!” As to whether or not this extremely resource-heavy computation will result in anything more than defacing classical artworks or generating memes is still yet to be seen.
Granted, Midjourney isn’t the only AI company offering these sorts of services. Gemini, ChatGPT (via Dall-E), Grok, and Copilot can all generate and edit images in a similar manner.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.