Midjourney, a new AI image generation service, has entered public beta testing in recent days via Discord, letting anyone type a text prompt and receive a high-quality, painterly image in about a minute. The service, founded by Leap Motion co-founder David Holz, bills itself as a social network for AI art, with users creating images in shared Discord channels. Unlike OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which expands access slowly, Midjourney is immediately available to all, with subscription tiers at $10 and $30 per month.

Holz described the service as a self-funded research lab that is already profitable, running on about 10,000 servers and serving hundreds of thousands of users. He noted Midjourney deliberately biases away from photorealism to avoid contributing to deepfakes, aiming instead to produce beautiful, artistic images. The company employs about 40 moderators to enforce content rules against adult material and gore.

Today, the atmosphere among early users is one of wonder and experimentation. Groups are sharing prompts and marveling at the dreamlike results. But the question already hangs in the air: when a machine paints, who is the artist?