A meme as a toy
TL;DR
Midjourney is enabling ideas (and products!) that have a large and untapped market. Businesses and creators that ride this opportunity early will gain a lot.
Midjourney is big and impressive
Over 14.5 million users have registered with Midjourney. 1.5 to 2.5 million users are active at any point in time. The tool has already generated many images- see this, this and this. However, few - if any - of these have been commercialized in any significant way.
Images today will be products tomorrow
The likelihood of an AI rendered image becoming a meme, the meme a product, and the product becoming a successful product is real. Go Ji’s work with Lego Figurines stands out as a great example of this. His work inspired me to do something similar with Hanuman (a Hindu God) and Monkey King (from Journey to the West). See below.
Hanuman
Monkey King
These images offer an opportunity to research and experiment new products
Seeing the response to Go Ji’s work, it’s not hard to imagine that a savvy company will use this to research (and experiment with) a limited edition product line.
Gen AI is proving to be a creative tool that is infinitely stretchable and available on tap
These examples are not random. Tools like Midjourney are turning creativity into a platform that’s infinitely stretchable and available to all. If you like to imagine concepts, ideas, and possibilities, Midjourney can help you augment your capabilities. It gives shape and form to your ideas. Makes them more real, more tangible and easier to socialize and sell.
Before long, there could be a large market for products and concepts created with tools like these. A new generation of creators will bring these products and possibilities to the market. These new products will also uncover many viable, and overlooked, niches in the market.
Up next, our tools (also) start imagining
Looking ahead, it’s not hard to see how tools like Midjourney will start learning from our ”imagine” prompts and also start giving us ideas about what else we could be imagining. That’s when our imagination will hit escape velocity.
What will you imagine?
Ps: A note about ownership rights
It’s also worth thinking about the ownership rights for these creations. Where should the IP live? Right now creators own the rights and Midjourney has an unlimited license. Going forward, there could be different subscription tiers with an option for creators to fully own their work.
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