I’ve been playing with the Midjourney AI Drawing Bot a lot this week. You access it by joining a Discord Server and entering commands, such as /imagine Cartoon Character Bulky Fantasy Knight.

I showed the bot to my six-year-old daughter and she immediately began feeding me prompts such as Pug Eating a Hot Dog and Cute Sleeping Kitten. We decided to make a game out of it where I’d feed the bot a prompt and she’d have to guess what that was. For example:

Yes the prompt was Fox Wearing Sunglasses. The AI has many limits, as you can imagine, but I found myself thinking about what the bot could be used for right now. The most obvious application is for Idea Creation. When a client says they want a picture of a Fox with Sunglasses, that’s often all you get. What is the fox doing? What are the exact colorations of the fox? Is he chubby or skinny? We all know what a fox looks like, but these minor details are completely left up to the artist who will often try all these variations to see which ones look the most pleasing or interesting. Being Creative isn’t something that’s always easy to turn on, especially several times a day for different projects. Artists will look at the world around them, flip through old magazines or (yes) surf the internet for inspiration. An AI Drawing Bot seems like a well suited tool for kick-starting the creative process.