Midjourney and Bing 2023/09/30: A farmer in space looking over his crops

Midjourney Prompt: /imagine a farmer in space, looking over his crops, the crops are growing inside a futuristic spaceship. Futuristic, sci-fi, digital art, hyper detailed.

Bing Prompt: Generate an image of a farmer in space, looking over his crops, the crops are growing inside a futuristic spaceship. Futuristic, sci-fi, digital art, hyper detailed.

A “Days of Future Past” explore: How will farming evolve in the future? Fertile soil on earth is declining. Will hydroponics offer more efficient food production? Can we hoist those farming installations in space? How does this collide with our ambitions to be a space faring species?

The prompts were nearly identical, except in Bing, I had to add a prefix (“Generate an image”) because Bing can also respond with text, and I wanted to be sure to get images in my response. Here are the results:

Midjourney:

Bing:

To me, Bing understood the brief a lot better! And it also projected what appear to be hydroponics in the images (something that I was imagining, when I wrote up this prompt). But I do like the outfits of the farmers in Midjourney’s results — I never would have expected a space farmer to wear turbans; but then again, I love how Bing is able to showcase human diversity in the look of a farmer!

Still, something about Bing’s results make me want to reconsider Midjourney. Maybe it is the play of shadows in MJ’s results; in contrast, everything is ‘glowing’ in Bing’s results. Call it bias, but I like MJ’s aesthetics better.

Overall, I will give this one to Bing. MJ probably is packaging the better aesthetic, but Bing got my prompt better. To illustrate this better, I redid the prompt slightly to explicitly focus on hydroponics:

The Hydroponic Prompt: MJ misses the prompt, Bing gets it.

Midjourney Prompt: /imagine a farmer in space, looking over his crops, the crops are growing in a hydroponic system inside a spaceship or outer-space station. Futuristic, sci-fi, digital art, hyper detailed.

Bing Prompt: Generate an image of a farmer in space, looking over his crops, the crops are growing in a hydroponic system inside a spaceship or outer-space station. Futuristic, sci-fi, digital art, hyper detailed.

Once again, the prompts are identical, but this time, I explicitly called out my intent for these to images to showcase a hydroponic system.

As you can see below, Bing is actually showing what appear to be hydroponic systems in what appear to be enclosing spaceships or space stations. Midjourney on the other hands seem to think that the plants can grow outside of the enclosure that houses the farmer, which is not quite what I asked for (at least that was not my intent).

Midjourney: