Learn With Sour Power: MidJourney --weird Parameter

Let's get weird with Midjourney and explore how we can render a variety of results with a single parameter.

If you've every used Midjourney before, you've probably noticed that there is a pattern of similarity from the image you render when you enter the same prompt. Of course, no image is ever exactly the same twice, but there is a consistent stylization that is applied and repeated with little variation.

If you're like me, you've hit that re-run button on the same prompt so many times looking for a little something extra. Sometimes you get there, sometimes you don't.

This is a great place to use Midjourney parameters to help expedite getting to the result you're looking for.

--weird

How does midjourney define the weird paramater?

"This parameter introduces quirky and offbeat qualities to your generated images, resulting in unique and unexpected outcomes."

(source: midjourney documentation)

It sounds fun, and exciting, but also vague. What does it mean to get quirky offbeat qualities? Of course the outcome is unexpected, I'm using AI to generate images, I can only get so close with my text prompts.

Let's break it down.

Using different values (in a range from 0 all the way to 3000) we can tell Midjourney just how "weird" we want the renderings to be.

Weird how?

Midjourney uses the previous prompt as a starting place, if there isn't one, the starting place is whatever the base stylization Midjourney applies to images. (If you're not sure what that style looks like, just type in the most generic prompt with as little description as possible, and see what you get.)

Thinking of whatever your starting place is, we can determine just how "weird" we want to be. Adding a weird value to a prompt changes the entire grid of 4 images to a totally different stylization.

(Note: this is different from chaos that changes the difference in generation from the 4 images in the grid. More on that coming soon in another post!)

Weird Examples

The first thing we'll do is render a grid of images and use that as our "base".

--weird 0

The prompt I used for this experiment was "candid shot of mysterious animals in the wild, shot on a 35mm film, artistic distortion, purple, black, silver, and gold".

(Feel free to use the same Midjourney prompt, or try something completely different!)

Here's what we get:

A grid of four midjourney images with a pink aesthetic, all animals shown in a natural setting. Photographic stylization. Top left: two sheep with horns, top right: two zebras, bottom left: one zebra, out of focus, bottom right: two foxes.

Now it's time to make things --weird.

By adjusting the prompt, and adding a --weird value, we can see the variation of the grid of images.

--weird 200

The next iteration of the prompt, we'll add a slight variation of weird, with --weird 200.

(Note: it is important to make sure you put the space between the word weird and the word 200. You can also take the word weird and shorten it to just w and get the same result, so --w 200 and --weird 200 mean the same thing.)

Here's what we get with --weird 200:

A grid of four Midjourney images with a pink aesthetic. All animals now shown in what appears to be a plastic mold. Still outside in natural elements. The first focuses more on what looks like a pineapple and is very abstract. Top right shows a deer that looks to be made out of circular elements, being guided in a meadow by humans. Bottom left shows two busts of horses with goat horns. Bottom right shows a plastic figurine of a purple stag that is life sized, next to a pile of large pink circular objects.

The results are absolutely weird! I'm having a hard time writing the descriptions of each image because they're just that unexpected. It's absolutely so much fun to use this paramater to see how AI thinks about the "quirky unexpected outcomes".

Let's keep going, we can take this prompt all the way up to 3000, and we started small with adding 200. I promise we won't do this 3000 times, but lets experiment with the drama.

One thing to note, is we are now building a prompt chain with Midjourney. We've used our base, and now we've added a layer of --weird 200, so our next layer of weird is going to use --weird 200 as its point of reference to deviate from.

--weird 450

For this next iteration of the prompt, we'll add even more weirdness to the results by adding --weird 450.

Remember our base prompt was ""candid shot of mysterious animals in the wild, shot on a 35mm film, artistic distortion, purple, black, silver, and gold" and we've added --weird 450 to the end of it.

Here's what we get (I promise you, I wasn't expecting any of these either!):

A grid of four Midjourney images. Top left displays a human in all purple in a pink forest with a normal colored deer head and antlers. An all black feathery human figure iwth a crow face stands next to them. Top right shows what appears to be skeletons of snake like armadillos coming out of a dirt desert with gold flowers. Bottom left shows two figurines of a wolf like creature in a flowery meadow on a gloomy day. Bottom right shows two abstract sculptures of zebras made out of metal in a golden flower meadow.

I had no idea what to expect when I was going through this experiement, but I know for a fact none of these would have ever come to my mind. This is what is so fun to me about using tools like Midjourney (or any other AI image generator) because you get to have fun and make things that are literally beyond your wildest imagination!

Let's do it one more time just to see if we get anything even crazier or more unexpected.

--weird 1000

(Remember, we can go all the way to --weird 3000 so there is even more that can be pushed in terms of quirky unexpected Midjourney generations.)

Here's what we get when we add --weird 1000

A grid of four midjourney images. Top left we see the backside of 2 cheetas and a human wearing a silicone bubbly dress looking at a field of pink sheep-like animals. Top right we see the backside of a human with bubbly purple hair and long molds of arms from its back standing in front of a very tall horse with the pattern of a giraffe. Bottom left we see two baby donkey type animals standing in a meadow of tall grass and lavendar like flowers. Bottom right we see two meercat type animals in pink and blue made out of furry feathery material standing in a grassy field.

And that's a wrap!

Why Midjourney? Why --weird?

With Midjourney you can bring to life beautiful images with no more than a mere thought. You can enter a text prompt and yield beautiful visuals. Since it's launch Midjourney has continuued to improve the rendering of features like human faces, hands, figures, and even text. With their updates also come even more "quirky" and "unexpected" combinations of visuals as well.

What will you be using the --weird prompt for?

Feel free to share your results in my Twitter thread!

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