This AI is Not Just Creative But Also CONSISTENT

Today’s Equation

Midjourney, the popular image-generating AI tool recently released an update focused on character consistency.

The new “Character Reference” or “–cref” feature allows users to specify a character reference image URL after the prompt.

Midjourney will then generate new images with the same character, maintaining consistent facial features, hairstyle, and clothing across different scenes and styles.

Based on the attached X post, it’s evident how Midjourney was able to generate multiple images that resemble the likeness of Sydney Sweeney.

How does this work? Can Midjourney genuinely recreate the resemblance of any uploaded image? Or did the tool generate these images solely because it identified Sydney Sweeney?

Let’s see if it all adds up.

• What is Consistent Character Styles
• So, What? World Building on Steroids
• Now, What’s in it for u⁺

Consistent Character Styles

The new “Character Reference” or “–cref” feature in Midjourney allows users to generate images of a consistent character across different scenes and styles.

Here’s how it works:

Providing a character reference image and tuning the character weight allows users to generate variations of the same character in different contexts, poses, and styles while preserving their key identifying visual characteristics.

This enables more consistent characters for applications like storyboarding, comics, games, and marketing visuals

World Building on Steroids

With this update, Midjourney aims to address the inconsistencies in its previous models.

This is because in the field of world-building, consistency plays a pivotal role.

Here are the key aspects where Midjourney’s new update will support creators:

1. Believability and immersion: When characters behave in a consistent manner that aligns with the established rules and logic of the fictional world, it makes that world feel more believable and immersive for the audience.
2. Avoiding confusion: Consistency helps avoid confusing or frustrating the audience. Consistency grounds characters.
3. Establishing trust with the audience: Maintaining consistency, especially in how the world operates, helps build trust between the writer and reader.
4. Highlighting intentional inconsistency: Against a backdrop of overall consistency, moments when a character breaks their established patterns can be used intentionally to create mystery, suspense or character growth. These inconsistencies stand out and drive the plot forward.
5. Balancing realism and narrative: No person is 100% consistent in real life, so some inconsistency makes characters feel more human. Careful worldbuilding finds a balance.

While characters shouldn’t be predictable, having their traits, abilities and choices fit logically within the constructed world is key to writing an immersive, emotionally resonant story.

Consistency makes the fictional dream feel real and meaningful to readers.

What’s in it for u⁺

This update is a major step forward for generative AI imagery.

Maintaining character consistency has been very challenging, making it difficult to use AI for storyboarding, comics, graphic novels, and other visual storytelling that requires characters to be recognizable across different images.

The “–cref” feature begins to solve this by enabling characters to be recreated more reliably.

Some key use cases include:

• Visual storytelling: Storyboarding films, creating comics/graphic novels, illustrating books
• Game development: Generating consistent character and avatar art
• Advertising/marketing: Creating visuals with brand mascots and spokespeople
• Virtual influencers/models: Enabling AI-generated characters to maintain their look

Overall, this feature allows Midjourney to be used in more professional creative workflows where character consistency is crucial.

As the technology continues to improve, generative AI will increasingly enable rapid, low-cost content creation and prototyping by both amateurs and professionals.