Haha, that was the craziest part about signing on midjourney, when you have to sign up via Discord

I don't use Discord on my office laptop, and that was very odd experience

Crazier still that they have been able to achieve what they have with zero external funding.

What do you mean by no restrictions? My account was flagged and under review after using two bold prompts.

The company doesn't have the same restrictions. They're not talking about the ai model.

Try creating something mocking Xi Jinping.

wait really? i'm not gonna sign up for midjourney but it's surprising to me that this would be restricted

Yep - they self-censor themselves according to China's whims, just so they can have China access now only to be banned by the great firewall 1 year from now after Chines startups scrape all their image outputs for training.

> space since they don't have all the same restrictions as the bigger companies.

Can you give an example? Midjourney is heavily censored so it seems like it has a lot of restrictions.

What are some examples of behaviors that would exemplify their heavy censorship?

try generating with the prompt "a spoony bard and a licentious howler", if you're willing to catch a ban for using ted woolsey's horrible, offensive language that was acceptable to 1990s nintendo of america

The only restrictions they have are that you can't imagine President Xi, nor can you mention anything PG-13 like bathing suits.

>nor can you mention anything PG-13 like bathing suits.

That's like the killer use case for image generating AIs

Maybe they got so far thanks to the Discord approach.

When you went to the Discord, you immediately got the endless stream of great looking stuff other people were generating. This was quite powerful way to show what is possible.

I bet one challenge for getting new users engaged with these tools is that you try to generate something, get bad results, get disappointed and never come back.

That's exactly true, and having built a similar bot for friends and acquaintances to use, the effect in question is huge. It makes no sense to go for a webapp first, second or even third.

They did a clever thing, they used Discord and their servers as CDN

No hosting of the generated pictures, just send them via discord message and forget them. No S3 or big cloud lambda functions.

Easy to start to make a minimal working prototype.

what do you mean they don't have restrictions?

Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc all have to shoehorn these things into their products to stay on top, but it's not their core business and they don't want it to take away from their ads or licenses they sell. Midjourney as a company is much freer to innovate without the burden of the restrictions of an established company.

That and you get user observability for free, and support injection in a way that to this day there’s no good way to do in an “app” experience.

Presuming your bot requires people to interact with it in public channels, your CSRs can then just sit in those channels watching people using the bot, and step in if they’re struggling. It’s a far more impactful way to leverage support staff than sticking a support interface on your website and hoping people will reach out through it.

It’s actually akin to the benefit of a physically-situated product demo experience, e.g. the product tables at an Apple Store.

And, also like an Apple Store, customers can also watch what one-another are doing/attempting, and so can both learn from one another, and act as informal support for one-another.

What was the confusing Discord experience? Was it that Discord was the main way to access Midjourney, and it was chaotic? I vaguely remember this, but didn't spend much time there.

The very fact that it was on discord in the first place was enough for me.