Make Your Midjourney AI Prompts Better With ChatGPT

Based on the cacophony of posts claiming that ChatGPT is everything from the end of the world to the newest, best way to slice bread, or at least a better way to bake bread, one would think that yours truly would have already figured out that the artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to help you write basic and advanced prompts for the generative image and art AI tool, Midjourney.

Until last week, I had not considered it. When that light bulb burst over my head, I simply wrote down the idea for future reference. After some down days of some flu-like crud, non-Covid, it sunk in that I should really try this idea out.

As we have read and seen over the past few weeks, the more specific you are with an AI tool, the better your results, usually. In these ChatGPT tests, I was not getting anywhere close. In last week’s post, Feel Like Midjourney AI Is Daunting ? Here Are Some More Prompt Tips, I studied and shared about some technical aspects – things like “aspect ratio” and “stylize” or even referencing a specific version of the service. I thought ChatGPT would know these sorts of details and fill them in.

First, I just tried on my own with ChatGPT, as you will see in a couple of screenshots. Hours later, with plenty of flops and some mild successes, I went searching and found several good posts. Bonus for me, I found a few good leads on new AI services to share with you. As in the early days of the internet, there is innovation happening at warp speed with people building new tools and services on top of the “old” tools such as ChatGPT and Midjourney. It is another wave of exciting frontiers to be explored. Yes, even though these tools have just hit the mainstream market, they will be the old timers in a bit.

As usual, ChatGPT is wordy.

I then jumped in to ask it for a prompt on a topic and the more I went on, the more I asked it to be more concise. None of my efforts produced a satisfactory image for what I hoped for in my request, but they were decent.

Medium.com has a fair number of people exploring Image AI Generators, but it is often behind a paywall, so you may need to get creative if you cannot get to this one (try an incognito browser): Crafting AI Prompts for Midjourney using ChatGPT by Phillip Olla. Phillip takes you through, much like I have been doing, with what is working and not working in his effort. He takes this long and detailed prompt he is using and realizes it is confusing the Image AI service and asks ChatGPT to make it shorter, better. ChatGPT helps him create what fits his vision.

This is only a portion of Phillip Olla’s adventure in trying to get Midjourney to create an image that works for his instructions and hopes for a specific image. He ultimately gets there. It is a short post worth reading (link above image). Special note: My main image is inspired by Phillip’s efforts, listed out in his post, but modified.

There is no shortage of people trying to figure out how to get better basic and more highly detailed, advanced results by way of superior prompts; prompt engineering, as it is now called.

Combine popular LinkedIn hashtags with ChatGPT

I was super impressed with Ryan McNally’s approach to using hashtags from LinkedIn to generate ideas and potential images. It was a fun and fresh way to think about AI imagery. He references a plugin, but I did not find which one. His explanation did start me searching for other prompt generator apps and tools; I will report back.

Here is one of Ryan’s excellent creations. Kudos to him for top-notch creativity.

As we have seen, ChatGPT is useful for prompt design. It helped me to generate fresh ways of looking at what I wanted, helped me boil them down to something simpler, but it did not do the more advanced without a lot more help. It does generate fresh ideas, expands on existing prompts, and creates multiple prompts efficiently. Sometimes they are too wordy and you have to keep whittling it down. Otherwise, Midjourney struggles to understand what on earth you are asking it for.

Reference: If you are trying to sort Midjourney, take a look at some of my earlier posts:

1. Midjourney AI Based Art Generator Creates Dazzling Images From Words
2. Improve Your Midjourney AI Image Creation With These Advanced Tips