You Know What to Do

I Dreamed I was Watching…

... civilization unravel. No, I was not asleep. I was looking at the news on the Internet. I am afraid that it was not a dream.

 

Where have all the flowers gone?

🎵When will they ever learn?

—Pete Seeger

Demure and Mindful

A current catchphrase on social media is "very demure, very mindful."  It was meant tongue in cheek, but I have made AI pictures that meet the criteria, mostly accidentally.

These were all created in August using StarryAI. Mostly I used styles that were created by other users because I wanted to see what they would do. Often they don’t come out demure at all, but that’s a topic for another time.

Sharing with Friday Face-off and Memes with Linky

Porch Pirates

 I read that you should watch out for porch pirates in the days following Amazon Prime days. 

Fortunately, AI was able to show me exactly what to watch for.

It’s Independence Day!

I tried to generate a picture of Washington Crossing the Delaware, but I neglected to say that he was in a boat.

Various Styles of Sadness

It's interesting to experiment with different styles. Mostly, I keep my prompts fairly simple because I’m curious to see what AI will come up with, but I deliberately use different styles. These are generated with StarryAI.

Faces, a bit magical

So many of my AI creations look mundane that I am pleased when I get something different that does not just look like a mistake. The first image is one I made using a style that StarryAI compiled from art that’s on my walls. (You can create your own style by uploading pictures.)

For the rest, I used other people’s styles,  partly to see what they might do.

 

Friday Face-off

Styles, Faces, Observations

Friday Face-Off

You may recognize the impressionist style that I specified for the first picture. For most of the other images, I experimented with various styles that I found on StarryAI. Sometimes my prompts were purposely vague. 

If I failed to specify a gender, I usually got a female. Perhaps that is because I used words like peaceful or garden. Or perhaps it is just that the Internet is full of pictures of girls. I got quite a few images of scantily-clad beauties, but I didn’t even download them. They are clichés.

The picture of a man is supposed to be a particular singer-songwriter. I’ll probably try that style again, if I can find it

Since AI draws from a database of existing images, it reflects the commonalities and banalities that exist in human culture. Many of the results are trite. Some look like amateur copies of a famous painting, or greeting cards from the dollar store. I’m always glad when I get something that’s a little bit different and not awful. Computers are not creative, at least not yet. They are imitative.

But so is most art. The more I play with computerized “art” and compare it to human-made art, the more I realize that most artists are also making imitative work. I like going to art shows, but an awful lot of artwork has as much sameness to it as AI images. Real brushstrokes do not guarantee originality.

A few more faces.

And finally, a squirrel. I created it for a post on my other blog.

 

Tiffany’s Black Cats

 

Imitating Lascaux

A user created a cave painting style for StarryAI. I played with it for a few minutes and enjoyed it. I’ll probably try it again.