Midjourney is an AI tool that generates images from a written description: type a sentence like “a lighthouse at dawn, watercolor style” and it returns a set of original images matching that prompt. It is one of the most widely used text-to-image generators, alongside OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, and is especially known for stylized, cinematic, and illustrative results rather than photorealism alone.
What it is and who makes it
Midjourney is built by Midjourney, Inc., a small San Francisco research lab founded by David Holz, who previously co-founded the motion-sensor company Leap Motion. The tool entered public beta on July 12, 2022, and has stayed independent and self-funded through subscription revenue rather than outside venture investment, which is unusual among major AI labs.
How it works
Under the hood, Midjourney uses a diffusion model: a neural network trained on a very large set of images and captions that learns to turn random visual noise into a coherent picture matching a text prompt, refining it step by step. You don’t need to understand the math to use it — you write a prompt, optionally add style keywords or reference images, and the system renders several image options in under a minute.
The company ships new model versions periodically; the current default is V8.1, released April 30, 2026, which renders roughly four to five times faster than earlier versions, produces sharper detail, and can place legible text inside an image — something earlier AI image generators struggled with.
How to get started
Midjourney originally worked only through a bot on the chat app Discord, and that option still exists, but since August 2024 the main way to use it is the web app at midjourney.com, which also syncs with Discord. There is no free trial — every account needs a paid subscription before it can generate images. To start: create an account, choose a plan, and type a prompt into the web app’s prompt bar. The interface offers buttons to vary, upscale, or edit any image it returns, so refining a result doesn’t require re-typing the whole prompt.
What it costs
As of June 2026, per Midjourney’s own plan structure, there are four monthly subscription tiers: Basic at $10/month (3.3 hours of fast rendering time, no relaxed/queued generation), Standard at $30/month (15 fast hours, plus unlimited slower “relax mode” generation), Pro at $60/month (30 fast hours, unlimited relax mode, and private “stealth” generations), and Mega at $120/month (60 fast hours, same features as Pro). Paying annually cuts each price by about 20%. All plans include commercial usage rights for the images produced. Because Midjourney sells rendering time rather than a fixed number of images, how far a plan stretches depends on how often you generate.
Why it keeps ending up in court
Midjourney is also one of the most legally contested AI companies, because — like other image generators — it trained its models on large sets of images scraped from the internet, largely without licensing them from the artists or studios that made them. Illustrators sued in January 2023 alleging their work was used without consent; Disney and Universal followed with a copyright suit in June 2025; Warner Bros. Discovery sued in September 2025 over the use of characters such as Superman and Batman in AI-generated images. These cases are still working through the US courts and will likely shape how copyright law treats AI training data more broadly.
In the news
That legal fight took a new turn today: Midjourney is asking a court to force the same studios suing it — Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. — to disclose their own internal use of AI, arguing the studios can’t credibly claim harm from AI image generation while using similar tools themselves. The outcome could affect what companies on both sides of AI copyright disputes are required to reveal in discovery.
FAQ
Is Midjourney free to use?
No. It removed its free trial in 2023 and now requires a paid monthly or annual subscription starting at $10/month.
Do I need Discord to use Midjourney?
No — the web app at midjourney.com has been the primary way to use it since August 2024, though the original Discord bot still works.
Who owns the images Midjourney generates?
Subscribers generally hold commercial rights to the images they generate under Midjourney’s terms of service, separate from the unresolved legal questions over the training data used to build the model.
How is it different from DALL-E or Stable Diffusion?
All three are text-to-image diffusion models with similar underlying technology; they differ mainly in interface, output style (Midjourney leans toward stylized, artistic results), pricing model, and licensing terms.
Sources: Midjourney — Wikipedia; Midjourney version documentation; Midjourney subscription plan pages (via secondary pricing trackers, current as of June 2026).