Midjourney

Last Tuesday I watched my neighbor's kid spend forty-seven minutes trying to generate a picture of "Sonic the Hedgehog eating ramen in a cyberpunk alley" on Midjourney, and I swear to fucking Christ I felt something die inside me. Not just because the kid kept adding more descriptors like he was casting a goddamn spell ("make it more neon! add flying cars! give Sonic bigger eyes!"), but because this dystopian hamster wheel masquerading as creativity has somehow convinced an entire generation that typing words into a Discord bot counts as artistic expression. Midjourney isn't a tool—it's a digital slot machine that occasionally spits out something that looks vaguely like what you asked for, assuming you have the patience of a Buddhist monk and the descriptive skills of a Victorian novelist. The fact that this thing lives exclusively in Discord, that graveyard of abandoned gaming servers and crypto scams, should have been our first red flag.

The pricing structure reads like a fucking ransom note. Ten bucks a month for the "Basic" plan gets you 200 generations—which sounds generous until you realize that 180 of those will be complete garbage that look like they were filtered through a fever dream about stock photography. Want to actually use your images commercially? That'll be thirty dollars, please. Want to generate privately without broadcasting your weird furry commissions to the entire Discord server? Fifty-three dollars monthly, you absolute freak. I've seen OnlyFans subscriptions with more reasonable pricing tiers. The fact that CEO David Holz tweets about "democratizing creativity" while running what amounts to a premium vending machine for synthetic art makes me want to throw my laptop into the nearest body of water.

Using Midjourney feels like being trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare designed by someone who's never actually made art but has very strong opinions about what art should look like. The interface—if you can call a Discord bot an interface—is about as intuitive as performing surgery with oven mitts. You type "/imagine" followed by your prompt, then wait. And wait. And fucking wait some more while the bot churns through whatever algorithmic sausage-making process transforms your innocent request for "a sunset over mountains" into four variations that look like Thomas Kinkade had a stroke while watching a screensaver. The upscaling feature works half the time, the remix options are more random than a Magic 8-Ball, and don't even get me started on the absolute chaos of trying to follow your own generation in a Discord channel moving faster than a cocaine-fueled stock ticker.

What truly enrages me isn't the technical limitations or the predatory pricing—it's the smug evangelism from Midjourney's army of prompt engineers who act like they've discovered fire because they figured out that adding "octane render, 8k, hyperrealistic" to everything makes the output slightly less shitty. These people have convinced themselves they're artists because they can craft the perfect forty-word incantation to generate something that looks like concept art from a video game that was cancelled in 2003. Meanwhile, actual artists are watching their work get scraped, processed, and regurgitated by this digital meat grinder while David Holz gives interviews about the "future of human creativity." It's like watching someone claim they're a chef because they're really good at ordering from UberEats.

The most damning thing about Midjourney isn't its clunky Discord prison or its insulting price points or even its founder's Twitter presence (though Jesus Christ, dude, maybe tweet less about revolutionizing art and more about fixing your broken-ass platform). It's that this company has somehow gaslit an entire creative community into believing that good art is just a matter of finding the right combination of buzzwords. Every Midjourney image has the same plastic, over-processed sheen—like someone took a real painting and ran it through fifteen Instagram filters. The AI has been trained on so much generic digital art and stock photography that everything it produces looks like it was designed by committee for a mobile game advertisement. It's creativity by algorithm, art by consensus, and it's absolutely fucking soulless.