As mentioned, what is better, MS Paint or photoshop? If MJ ignores your prompt and spits out a half related picture, are you going to continue using it?
If anything MJ is a stepping stone to SD. You get a taste of AI art, but want to do something specific that MJ cannot do. You learn about control-net, alternative models, inpainting, etc... and you decide you need to move on from MS Paint to Photoshop.
I personally used free AI art(cant remember which), it was super cool, but quickly I wanted to use different models and generate thousands of pictures at a time. I wanted to make gifs, img2img, etc... and the only people doing that were on SD.
The question is not "which is easier?", but rather "which is easier to use to produce high-quality output". In your analogy, I'd argue the answer to that question is actually Photoshop. Likewise the answer in the MJ/SD case is MJ.
Metaphor is useful, but this feels overly-reductive. The gap between the amount of effort it takes to make something great or approaching the vision you had is massive between MS Paint and Photoshop. Not so for SD and MJ.
However, I am appreciating that SD seems to be clearly better if you need something more specific / precise. I don't think I'm convinced (yet) that because it can get more precise inherently makes it a better tool.
There are definitely some professionalized paradigms emerging in the use of SD: one video tutorial I saw this morning covering basic photobash + img2img and use of controlnet had a commenter saying that they preferred using the lineart function in controlnet to get more control and leverage their drawing skills.
When you see that kind of thing it's a huge signal for professionalization, because someone suggesting the optimal first step is "learn how to draw" deviates so completely from the original context of prompt-based image generation: "just type some words and the image magically appears".
Midjourney let's you type in a thing and get a result that will look great, which is no small accomplishment. If you want "incidental art" like blog post heros there is no competition. But it's really hard to use if you want to get exactly what you want.
Alternatively, if you don't know what you want, it's really good for inspiration.
In my opinion, it is tedious to discuss whether Midjourney or Stable Diffusion is better.
Both are tools with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Midjourney
- Comparable to a ready-made consumer product.
- Easy to use and you get excellent results quickly.
- The feature set is limited. So you can't influence so well how the result should look like.
- Restrictions on what you can generate with it (gore, nudes).
- Fee required.
Stable Diffusion
- Comparable to a development kit. Technical, Difficult to use, different tools that you have to configure and use correctly.
- For excellent results you have to invest much more time.
- Extensive feature set (inpaining, outpaining, upscaling, ControlNet, many different models, LORAs, textual inversions). You can much better define how the result should look like.
- No restrictions on what you can generate.
- Free if you install it locally.
Does being easier not influence whether it's better? I mean this in that for many of the ways AI art would be used, MJ already seems to be "good enough" at a lot of it.
Secondarily: doesn't Midjourney's increased user base and increased ratings they get from users help it refine its model, thus meaning that "ease of use" creates a feedback loop with "quality of output" because more users are engaged?
I'm asking real questions, not making a statement I believe in and just adding a question mark.