Midjourney Isn’t the Most Accurate AI—That’s Why It’s the Best

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

ChatGPT's image generator can now render text perfectly and follow prompts with surgical precision. Midjourney still struggles with both. Yet I reach for Midjourney every single day.

There’s a good reason for that. The best creative tools don't give you what you ask for—they give you what you didn't know you needed. And that requires a kind of beautiful chaos that only Midjourney has mastered.

I’ve been a fan of Midjourney since it came out nearly three years ago, and even wrote a guide to using it. And while I’ve used every major image generation tool on the market, I keep coming back to this one. In fact, it helped me discover Every’s visual identity.

Let’s dive into how I used Midjourney to create Every’s look and feel, how to prompt it effectively, what’s so special about it, why its imperfections are a feature and not a bug, and how to harness its unique strengths.

How Midjourney discovered Every’s visual identity

When I set out to create Every's visual identity, I expected to find inspiration in the usual places—Pinterest, design blogs, art books.

Then I stumbled on Midjourney’s public feed. It’s like a user-generated Pinterest board, containing images created and remixed by a Midjourney user, allowing anybody to search and filter through its collective consciousness. I knew we wanted something that encapsulated our published work: curiosity, the future unknown, classical knowledge within a modern context, and technology as both a myth and tool.

After I found some images I liked, I noticed a button that said “copy prompt.” Being able to read the prompt of an image is like trying a dish and seeing the recipe. Once you learn it, you can play with it and make it your own. I began to bounce ideas off of Midjourney’s user base.

I wrote prompts about Every's values and vision for the future, and found myself in a rabbit hole of classical art, vintage illustration styles, Greco-Roman architecture, and eventually Dadaism, pop art, and postmodernism. I was blending Greek sculptures with more vibrant color, technology elements, and richer textures. This exploration of neoclassical pop art was completely unexpected, and felt thematically correct.

Soon this style started to bleed into all of Every’s visual touchpoints. It quickly became clear that it could become our own. This wouldn’t have happened if I wasn’t playing with Midjourney.

Midjourney is my go-to creative companion precisely because of its unpredictability. The company has doubled down on serendipity, and that makes all the difference for creative work.

Make email your superpower

Not all emails are created equal—so why does our inbox treat them all the same? Cora is the most human way to email, turning your inbox into a story so you can focus on what matters and getting stuff done instead of on managing your inbox. Cora drafts responses to emails you need to respond to and briefs the rest.

Try Cora today

Want to sponsor Every? Click here.

How to prompt Midjourney effectively

The name Midjourney is a key to its superpower: It’s more about being in the messy middle of exploration than about reaching a destination. Here’s how to get the most out of it:

1. Start with a seed idea. Don’t worry about being hyper-specific in your prompt at first. Worry more about the overall concept you are trying to achieve and prompt just that, like I did with the image above.
2. See what Midjourney suggests. Midjourney will spit out four alternate options for you to pick from or edit.
3. Remix and iterate. Your goal is not to find the perfect output, but to find something with potential. Rephrase the prompt, or use different settings and image references.
4. Discover rather than dictate. Do not marry your first concept. Be flexible and explore different pathways for how the output can go. Remember, you are not following a map—you are driving without one.

The Reach Test: Do I use it every day?

While I occasionally use tools like ChatGPT's image-gen and Flux, Midjourney is my daily creative companion. I find myself automatically reaching for it whenever I need visual inspiration for a project, I'm exploring a new aesthetic direction, I want to be surprised by what AI can do, or I'm feeling creatively stuck.

Using Midjourney is the difference between using a calculator (precise, predictable) and working on a sketchbook (messy, inspiring).

Why Midjourney still feels like magic

While other tools have focused on accuracy and prompt adherence, Midjourney has been optimized for aesthetics and discovery.

It rewards patience over precision

Ask ChatGPT for a "diagram of an F-16 engine," and every bolt, label, and turbine blade is exactly where you expect. It's impressive, in a clinical, predictable sort of way.

Midjourney is more like a Pandora’s box you can steer. You might get something close to your request, or you might get something wildly different but somehow better than you imagined. The unpredictability isn't a bug; it's the entire point.

Prompting Midjourney isn't deterministic, with a straightforward input-output. It's probabilistic and rewards discovery. It requires patience and curiosity. You can't send one prompt and await perfection. And while other AI tools encourage you to extract a precise mental picture, Midjourney invites you to find ideas you hadn’t even considered. Take Every’s visual style—the final direction wasn’t something I planned for; it was something Midjourney and I were able to discover together.

The platform is built for flow

Not one image generation tool nails the user experience quite like Midjourney. It's snappy, responsive, and simple. The public feed, and the ability to remix and prompt from other people’s generated content, might seem strange at first, but you can channel that wonderful communal energy into prompt ideas and different creative directions.

There are no complicated settings panels or endless toggles. It’s just you, your imagination, and a constantly regenerating canvas.

What doesn't work well

Let's be honest: If you need pixel-perfect control, Midjourney will drive you insane. Text rendering? Still a nightmare. Anatomical correctness? Hit or miss. Specific brand styles? Possible but requires lots of patience and reference images. Midjourney is not a tool that gives you outputs that you can run with immediately. It gives you a creative challenge for which it's up to us designers to make perfect for the use case.

And the learning curve can be steep if you’ve only ever used ChatGPT’s image generation tool. I've watched new users get frustrated because they can't get exactly what they want on the first try. That's not how this relationship works.

The future of creative AI tools

What Midjourney gets right, and what I hope other AI tools learn from it, is that creative work isn't only about precision. It's about discovery, exploration, and happy accidents that lead to breakthroughs. The more you can induce the feeling of serendipity in a creative tool, the more it keeps me prompting and pushing it to its limits.

As AI advances, I worry we'll optimize too heavily for accuracy at the expense of serendipity. We'll build tools that give us exactly what we ask for, rather than what we didn't know we needed.

The best creative tools should feel like collaborators, not calculators. They should surprise, challenge, and push us in new directions. Working with them should feel more like jamming with a slightly unpredictable bandmate. It’s the difference between following a map and exploring without one.

In a world of increasingly powerful AI tools, Midjourney remains my favorite, not because it's the most advanced, but because it still feels alive. It's the thrill of not knowing exactly what you'll get, and loving that uncertainty.

Prompting, in the end, is 99 percent patience. But with Midjourney, it's also joy, frustration, surprise, and flow.

And in creative work, that is all that matters.

Lucas Crespo is the creative lead of Every. He was previously an art director at the advertising agencies BBDO and VML. You can follow him on LinkedIn and on X at@lucas__crespo.

We build AI tools for readers like you. Automate repeat writing with Spiral. Organize files automatically with Sparkle. Deliver yourself from email with Cora.

We also do AI training, adoption, and innovation for companies. Work with us to bring AI into your organization.

Get paid for sharing Every with your friends. Join our referral program.