Midjourney's new 4x super-resolution update can upscale images to striking detail, rivaling specialized tools like Gigapixel AI. An artist who spent a hundred hours on a book cover was accused of using AI, highlighting how good these tools have become. The feature integrates directly into text-to-image workflows and hints at what's coming for phones and video.
Questions this video answers
A hundred hours.
4x super resolution.
Weights & Biases (sponsorship mentioned; experiment tracking and model evaluation service).
Chapters
Surprising news appeared. An artist spent a hundred hours creating something truly incredible for a book cover image. Unfortunately only to be accused having used an AI. However, when I looked at this, my first thought was that this looks way too good for an AI image in 2023. Why is that? Well, look, there is so much detail in this image. No state of the art text to image AI system can match it. The resolution of this image, the number of pixels are just too high. Until now, dear fellow scholars, this is two minute papers with Dr. Zsolnai. Now, previous techniques already exist to increase the resolution of input images or even videos. This is what we call upscaling or super resolution. And it is starting to appear in video games and in some cases it already runs in real time. So why not apply it to these AI made photos? That should be easier than video, right? Well, not quite. You see, super resolution means that we introduce new information into an image and this new information is unfortunately not always what should be there. For instance, text can easily get mangled in video games. Or if we have a stationary photo that we would like to frame in it, better not have artifacts like this, right? So is all hope lost for high resolution images? That was what I thought until I saw the news from midjourney. A popular text to image AI system which can now create incredibly detailed high resolution images with a recent update and the results are truly insane. How does it work? Well, you first generate a lower resolution image. These are pretty good. However, when we start zooming in, we start to see the limits of this resolution. But then hold on to your papers fellow scholars, because we can ask it to perform 4x super resolution and then this happens. Ooo, there is just so much more detail in these images. I am completely stunned. Wow, this seems like years and years of progress and it just dropped a few days ago in an update like nothing had happened. Now other super resolution or image upscaling systems also exist. In fact, they are in abundance today. We have so many options. However, this kind of quality is beyond what I have seen from other solutions out there. According to other users, it is perhaps matched only by the Gigapixel AI system. I gave it a brief try and did not have too much luck with it so far. It is also a standalone application which is not necessary when it is built right into the text to image AI. For me, so far this workflow has been unmatched and it just delivers over and over again. My opinion is that these techniques are deceivingly useful. You see, you may often have an image that is A regular photograph or an AI generated work where you love the image but the framing is not quite perfect and you would only like to use one small part of it. However, when you do that, you take the parts that you like and suddenly there are just not enough details for this image to stand on its own. And in these cases, these super resolution techniques can make or break that image. Loving it now. Not even this technique is perfect. Not even close. In some cases excessive smoothing happens which is quite curious. Look, you would think that this is the low resolution image and this is the upscaled, but that is not the case. Due to this smoothing, details are not only added to the image, but some can even disappear in the process. But in return, the overall image and the edges of the objects are way sharper. So there are cases where this is a trade off that we have to consider. And my goodness. Through the power of AI research, today everyone can experience the amazing feeling of their artistic ideas and coming to life. There are already systems that even work on the phone in your pocket. Wow. And to think that text to video also exists. Just imagine that soon this is what will happen to videos too. Soon everyone will be able to become a movie director for at a small cost. And then over time all this will be free for all of us. What a time to be alive. We are sponsored by weights and biases, experiment tracking, model evaluation and production monitoring for your deep learning products and LLM apps. It is the best. Everyone is using it. Try it out now at WNB Me Papers or click the link in the description below.
