Video Gamer is reader-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices subject to change. Learn more
Let’s go over all the key differences between ChatGPT and Midjourney, two of the most renowned and popular artificial intelligences that are commercially available.
Since the launch of ChatGPT, countless updates have been pushed. When it once used the GPT-3.5 model, it’s now seeing GPT-4 and GPT-4 Turbo as massive upgrades. On top of that, it’s baked into the internet with multimodal capabilities too: image generation and input, notably.
Midjourney has been around for a little while longer than ChatGPT, and though it’s not used as widely as OpenAI’s chatbot, it’s seen some wildly impressive growth in the fidelity of its generated images.
It’s hard to say that ChatGPT is a ‘chatbot’ anymore, what with the sweeping scope of its functionality, but all of its new features can easily be compared with Midjourney’s now.
What do ChatGPT and Midjourney do?
| ChatGPT | Midjourney |
| Natural Language Conversation: ChatGPT is capable of reading text and returning a conversational output. | Image generation: Midjourney uses the diffusion model to create images. |
| Coding, data analysis, and problem solving. | Image editing / remixing |
| Text Summarization: The GPT-4 model can read large bodies of text and summarize them near-instantly. | |
| Writing assistance. | |
| Language translation | |
| Image Generation: ChatGPT Plus has DALL-E 3 hardwired into it. | |
| Image input. |
Honestly, listing out all of ChatGPT’s features against Midjourney’s will feel a little pointless. Where ChatGPT can do 100 things, Midjourney does one really well.
Midjourney is far better at Image Generation than ChatGPT
As someone who pays for ChatGPT Plus, the fact that it has been laced with DALL-E 3 integration is a huge benefit. Generating images is fun, useful, fast and responsive, however I’m not going to sugar-coat it. It just simply doesn’t look as good as Midjourney’s images that rely on the Diffusion model instead.
Generated images through Midjourney simply look a lot more photoreal than that of ChatGPT’s. Here’s a comparison of the same prompt generated via both Midjourney and ChatGPT’s DALL-E 3 integration: Realistic photo of bear sitting on a rock, gentle stream in the background with a fish jumping out of the water.
As you can see, the difference in image quality between Midjourney’s and ChatGPT’s is astounding. The attention to detail, textures, lighting, and terrain is vastly superior to ChatGPT’s.
There’s something uncanny and unnerving about OpenAI’s generated image that kind of scares me. It looks like something out of a psychedelic horror.
On top of that, Midjourney’s image generation flexibility is far superior, having different micro-models available through commands.
ChatGPT vs Midjourney: Price
It’s not too expensive to foot the cost of ChatGPT Plus, which is $20/month. With this, you get access to GPT-4 which is by far one of the most powerful LLM out there, alongside various plugins and integrations. DALL-E 3 being one of them.
Midjourney, on the other hand, is available for a range of plans: $10/month, $30/month, $60/month, and $120/month. Each of these different model variants give you access to different tiers of generation speed and features, though the $10 is more than enough for most lightweight users.
Which is better between ChatGPT and Midjourney?
Ultimately, the image generation capabilities of Midjourney far outclass ChatGPT’s. That said, after that there’s just so much more you can do with OpenAI’s chatbot than with Midjourney. It’s functionality is more suited productivity, data analysis, and conversational output.
The fact that it can even generate images is just the bells and whistles of it all.
