Midjourney is a text-to-image generative AI created by an independent, self-funded research lab founded by David Holz. According to Midjourney’s own documentation, the service turns a written prompt into a set of images: a user types a description, and the system generates a batch of pictures to choose from and refine. For its first years Midjourney was used primarily through a Discord server, with image creation later moving to the midjourney.com website.
Midjourney ran a limited beta in the spring of 2022 and opened a public beta in July 2022, after which it quickly grew into one of the most widely used image generators alongside DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion, all of which arrived in the same period. Its outputs became known for a distinctive, painterly aesthetic, and the tool drew both enormous popularity and debate over the use of AI-generated art.
Note on sourcing: Midjourney’s documentation site is the live primary for what the product is and how it works. The precise public-beta opening date of July 12, 2022 was announced by David Holz in a message on Midjourney’s Discord server, which is not a stable, archivable web document; that exact date is therefore not first-party verifiable through a durable URL here.