Two days ago, MidJourney announced that there would no longer be rewards for the first 2,000 users who use the image ranking system. They mention that bot abuse and automation of the process accounted for over 50% of cases, and they want to make it more altruistic and end the free GPU hours.
In our opinion, this is the same as shooting yourself in the foot. There are more and more competitors, and some are even better than MidJourney in many aspects. MidJourney keeps closing in on itself (itself?) and doesn’t seem to see that there are many other AIs out there. Some of them are free or at least have free trials, daily or monthly credits, etc. MidJourney no longer has free trials or anything similar. If you want to use it, you have to pay.
Is this the right model? Do they think they’re that good?
When realistic photography equals or surpasses another AI, what will be MidJourney’s selling point? In our humble opinion, today, the only thing that separates a good image made with Stable Diffusion from one made with MidJourney is realistic photography. When comparing pure and detailed illustrations, there isn’t much of a difference. Comparing control over images, the truth is that with all the new parameters they’re offering (–sref, –cref, etc.), it’s far from being a Controlnet.
MidJourney, what’s going on?
Removing incentives for paying users is alienating customers. If the calculations are correct and 50% of rankings were done through bots or any type of automation, a simple calculation indicates that half of paying users are now angry with this decision. Some will leave for sure.
MidJourney, have you thought carefully about what you’re doing?
The excuse that this will free up a lot of GPU usage doesn’t make sense given the recent issues we’ve had. The command hasn’t been able to be executed and similar messages, it’s not acceptable when the GPU usage is being improved and the option to reward the top 2,000 in the image ranking task is being cut off. It doesn’t add up. The impact has been just the opposite.
Is it a coincidence? It’s possible. It’s plausible that an issue occurred when they modified and expanded the system parameters. It’s still puzzling. We’ll see what happens in the coming days. Meanwhile, thousands of users are disgruntled with this decision. Many of them will likely leave.
