Midjourney V2

What Version 2 was

Midjourney V2 was the second model version of Midjourney's image generation model, released on 12 April 2022 ^[1]. In systems of this kind a version number marks a distinct generation of the model: the same written prompt given to two versions can come back as visibly different pictures, which is why users who want a particular look keep track of which version produced it. When V2 was current, the route to the model was the Midjourney Discord bot, which is how the service was used before the open beta ^[1]. The model was therefore reached inside a chat application, through the bot, in that period.

The default model

Midjourney's documentation records that Version 2 was the default model from April 2022 to July 2022 ^[2]. "Default" means the version that answers a prompt when the user does not ask for a particular one: during those months, a prompt that named no version was handled by V2. The window Midjourney records for it begins with its April release and ends with the arrival of its successor in July, so V2's time as the default covers the gap between the two releases.

The traits Midjourney records

The same documentation describes Version 2 as creative, colorful and painterly, with low coherency ^[2]. Each word points at something a viewer can see. "Painterly" describes images that look as though they were made with paint rather than photographed — visible marks, blended colour, a picture that reads as an illustration. "Colorful" and "creative" describe the palette and the willingness of the model to invent compositions rather than produce something plain. "Low coherency" is the limiting trait, and it is worth spelling out: coherency is the degree to which the parts of a picture agree with one another — whether limbs and hands are put together plausibly, whether the perspective holds, whether an object keeps the same shape from one side of the frame to the other. A model with low coherency can produce a striking overall composition while details inside it come out garbled or inconsistent. The combination Midjourney records — strong colour and painterly surfaces on one side, weak internal consistency on the other — is a specific description of what V2's pictures tended to look like.

Handover to V3

The successor, V3, was released on 25 July 2022 ^[1]. According to the same documentation, Version 3 was the default model from July 2022 to November 2022 ^[2]. The two records fit together: V2's documented run as the default ends where V3's begins, and the month of the handover is the same in both.

Where the description comes from

Midjourney keeps an account of its older versions on a Legacy Features documentation page ^[2], and that page is the source for the characterisation above. It is a particular kind of evidence: the maker's own later summary of what each version was like, rather than a review written while the version was current. Read that way, V2 is the version associated with the stretch between the Discord-bot era before the open beta ^[1] and the July 2022 switch to V3.