Midjourney Is a Taste Engine
Fidelity is table stakes. The house look is the product.
[ essay ]
Midjourney is a taste engine. The model generates images. The product is a house style you can prompt toward: a certain light, a certain saturation, the look people mean when they say it looks like Midjourney. That prior is the moat. A random image model can make a picture. Midjourney made a recognizable default.
I am a customer of the public product, mostly as someone who has to look at the output in the same Discord-shaped internet as everyone else. I do not work there. I do not use it as a substitute for photographing a trip or designing NeuroShell chrome. The Discord server as the original UI was the tell. Taste is social. You learn the dialect in public, you steal other people’s prompts, you subscribe because the aesthetic is the thing you cannot get from a generic checkpoint without work.
Other models caught up on fidelity. The remaining question is whether you want Midjourney’s taste or your own. If you want the house look, pay for the house. If you want a picture that does not announce the vendor, you will fight the prior the whole way. That fight is the product working. Defaults are sticky. This one is visual.
Taste is a product. Name it when you buy it. Do not call it “an AI” as if the look were an accident of the weights.
— JV · Dark Heart Labs.