What does that even mean? AI-generated art?

It means that some maniacs have written computer software that can generate images based only on text input. So you can basically just type some text… anything you want, and the computer will generate an image based on that text. Sounds pretty amazing.

I told it to create a “sleep paralysis demon”.

This actually wasn’t the first thing I told the AI to create so I knew that it was going to look pretty fucked up. But I didn’t expect this:

If you’ve seen a sleep paralysis demon, you’ll know that this is pretty fucking accurate. So how did a computer make something this “accurate” (to me at least) that represents a completely “human” experience?

Well, it’s important to understand that the way this software works is that it “learns” how to create images by looking at a lot of images. When you give it a prompt, it will try to create something that matches the request based on all of the images it has seen before. So the computer doesn’t create the image using its imagination. It’s using shit tons of data that was generated while the modal was being trained. Which is cool and all, but I think that means it’s using other people’s artwork to make “new” artwork for me.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand I’m always open to new technologies and advancements that allow more people to create art. I’ve seen my share of pearl clutching about how new things like Photoshop or even digital cameras themselves are somehow the end of true creativity, and I’m usually on the side of the new technology. But in this case, it feels like we’re starting to cross a line. I have to think about this some more, but my gut tells me that this is all moving too fast with too little oversight.

Anyway, while I think about that, I’m still going to play around these tools to see what they can do.

I actually kind of lied earlier. When I asked the AI to create a “sleep paralysis demon”, it generated these 4 images:

And then I asked for variations on the bottom left version and got these 4 images:

You can also do dumb shit like “impressionist borat”:

Or “sci-fi robot alex trebek”:

Or “archduke metallica“:

Or even “a face made of faces”

The possibilities seem endless (and potentially copyright infringing).