Midjourney Can Turn Your IRL Photo Into a Supercool Avatar - Here's How

Update, 6:35pm PT: I'm having trouble replicating this process with my own photo. If you have advice/tips, please post in Comments! 

Update 2, 11/18: Finally got this to work on my own photo. The original instruction included brackets and quotation marks but those aren't necessary when communicating with Midjourney.

The photo at top left is Nick Yee, founder of gamer market research firm Quantic Foundry; the others are variations of Nick in different genres, as interpreted by Midjourney. 

"It was always possible to do image-based prompts in Midjourney," Nick explained on social media recently, "but they used to be treated very loosely and couldn't be used to replicate faces. The newest version has much stickier image-based prompting."

Here's how you do that: Find a photo of yourself online, and then enter something like this into Midjourney's image prompt:

/imagine <image link> fantasy-hunter-warrior

/imagine <image link> futuristic-cyberpunk-hacker

/imagine <image link> captain-america

(Or instead of Captain America/cyberpunk/etc., whatever evocative genre terms you want to use, of course.)

The results are pretty impressive, especially since AI image readers have a notorious problem with racial bias.

"I've just been pleasantly surprised that it gets 'asian' correct (without me specifying 'asian' in the prompt) and doesn't just make me white," as Yee puts it.

Nick Yee is actually among the top experts in the power of avatars, so as you might have guessed, he's been thinking about how this approach might be used in games/MMOs/virtual worlds.

"I typically don't care about character customization in games," as Nick writes, "but now I wonder if that's only because it's never been easy/possible to make a character actually look like me in a game, whereas I'm rolling these characters and always having the feeling of 'oh - it would be cool to play this as a character in a game'."

I'm wondering about that too! You think there would have been the same backlash to Mark Zuckerberg's avatar if it was first created in Midjourney?

Try it out yourself, and share results in Comments! If I get a cool batch, I'll share some others in a follow-up.

Photo and images copyright Nick Yee

Update, 11//18: Here's what Midjourney did with a link to my photo plus "hipster starfleet commander".

 

Comments

[Tom]

I had a little success. The URL has to be one that Discord knows, i.e. can't be any old web URL. Upload the image to Discord first, then use its URL in the prompt. I could NOT, however, get anything near as cool as Nick's images. My supplied head shot was simple and clear but resulted in very crude images. I'm sure it's down to my prompt writing skill.

[Adeon Writer]

It's always important with these neural network imagery that how much cherry picking there is. For every good result there's usually hundreds of rejects.

I once had to run a prompt 600+ times and in exchange I ended up with 14 good pictures.

[sasuke2690]

Really beautiful looks like a real person and has a soul
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[lolbeans]

I feel like the main character is prettier than the other characters.

[Gagan]

3D cartoon character

[manojeyfff]

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