Midjourney’s Achilles Heel
OK, first, despite the headline — I don’t necessarily think this is really a critical flaw of Midjourney. However, my imagination gets the better of me when an AI isn’t able to perform a specific task that should seem straight forward.
In the opening of season 3 of Rick & Morty (spoiler alert), Rick asks another character to stand up and fold himself over seven times. As a result, it breaks a simulation because it can’t compute so many folds.
So, when I see Midjourney struggle, I wonder if it’s reaching the same limit. Surely, it must have seen training material with this data.
For me, the test was asking it to draw fractals. It seems to fail at generating a simple picture of a fractal. Maybe I’m not trying out enough prompts but it seems to fail and give me something “fractal-like” without an actual fractal.
Here’s what it did:
Colorful Fractals…
Mandelbrot Sets… Don’t be cute with me, Midjourney…
5 Circles Inversion Fractal…
Julia Set Fractal…
Viscek Fractal
A Mandelbub…
And of course, a Douay Rabbit… seriously??
The idea that we can “break” these generative AI engines with a prompt is a fun way of exploring the edges. Right now, we’ve created a tool for which we don’t know what the edges are. People are poking around and discovering cool things.
Some note that ChatGPT has no knowledge of things after 2021; I’ve pointed out here that Midjourney messes up hands; DallE Mini produces nightmarish distorted faces ala Monkey Christ. What is going to be even more complicated is that these edges will be broadening and it will be nearly impossible for us to find them within the next few years.
