An interview with David Holz, Leap Motion co-founder and Midjourney founder, on creating the AI art generator, using Discord to build its community, and more
James Vincent / The Verge : Tweets: @daspetey , @jjvincent , and @jjvincent Tweets: Pete Mitchell / @daspetey : As the world struggles to understand AI and how it will affect creativity, tons of really fun conversations are starting to happen. Here's a great interview with the creator of Midjourney: https://www.theverge.com/... James Vincent / @jjvincent : had a fantastic time talking to @midjourney founder @DavidSHolz about the world of AI image-generation! also fun: all illustrations were generated with AI using the text as prompts. below: “An Xbox with a giant AI processor and all the games are dreams” https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/... James Vincent / @jjvincent : AI image generation is a fast-moving field ofc and there's lots of important stuff we didn't touch on. But I think David's viewpoint is a helpful illustration of a certain hopeful, humanistic stance that focuses on the imaginative potential of these tools https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
This August 2022 interview catches Midjourney's David Holz at the moment his Discord-native image generator is becoming one of the three names — alongside DALL-E 2 and Imagen — that define AI art, a framing a New York Magazine deep-dive formalized weeks later. The Verge even illustrated the piece with Midjourney outputs generated from the text itself, a early demonstration of the tool being used editorially.
The arc since then validates the strategy Holz describes here: the Discord-first community he built became the gatekeeping mechanism Midjourney only dismantled two years later, when it opened image generation on its website to everyone rather than just users with 10K+ images on Discord.
First-order effects
- Midjourney's reliance on Discord means its growth, moderation, and product feedback loops all run through someone else's platform — the interview makes community-building, not model quality, the stated differentiator.
- Holz's Leap Motion pedigree signals to investors and users that Midjourney is a consumer-interface bet, not a research-lab play like OpenAI's DALL-E 2 or Google's Imagen.
Second-order effects
- Competing generators face pressure to replicate the community moat: Midjourney's Discord server doubles as a public gallery where every prompt and output is visible, turning users into both marketing and training signal.
- Commercial adoption follows the community — the related coverage shows Midjourney users producing client concept art and cutting stock-art purchases, pulling revenue from stock libraries toward prompt-driven tools.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, AI art platforms graduate from chat-app communities to standalone web products with their own identity systems — exactly the path Midjourney took when it opened its website beyond heavy Discord users.
- The same community-built legitimacy now cuts both ways: by the time of Bloomberg's 2024 profile, Midjourney was preparing for scrutiny around the US elections, and creator-studio operations like Neural Viz's sci-fi universe built on Midjourney, Flux, and Runway show individual creators assembling multi-tool pipelines atop these platforms.
The trend: AI image generation is moving from invite-only Discord communities toward mainstream web products, with community scale — not model benchmarks — deciding which tools professional creators adopt.