I'm an artist!

Alright, I did it! After reading several other posts about AI art and seeing people talk about it in one of the Telegram channels, I am in, I decided to circle back to it and actually dig in a little more.

Don't let the title fool you, I am absolutely not an artist, however given the fact that I am pretty decent at typing words, I thought I might have a chance to create something really great.

What you see above was my first try at this whole AI art thing.

I know there are a ton out there, but MidJourney is the one that most people I know have been talking about. I think it was @kommienezuspadt that first put this one on my radar. What I didn't realize is everything is done by typing in prompts. I thought you still had to have some kind of artistic skill to do this. It turns out you just need to put words together in a clever way. After four plus years on Hive, I think I am pretty good at that if I do say so myself.

What you see above was my first try. After you visit the MidJourney web page and then join their Discord server you have to do a little playing around to get the "Newbie" channels to show up. Once they do, you are ready to create. You get something like 25 free creates before you have to start paying for the service. I think I am a little over 10 at this point, so I am trying to conserve them from here on out.

In the Newbie channel you type the command "/imagine" and then whatever text you want the AI to generate. In this case I chose: "gothic barn sunset wedding disowned spectacular". I don't know if the last two phrases really came into play on this one. I wasn't really paying attention. It wasn't until later that I realized the images show up in phases. As the system parses through each word, it adds more and more to the image. It is pretty cool to watch in real time.

Next, I decided to type in the first line of a poem I memorized in high school. The Solitary Reaper by William Wordsworth:

Behold her single in the field
Yon solitary highland lass
Reaping and singing by herself
Stop here or gently pass

And this is what it gave me. Pretty cool huh? Now of course, these weren't my words, so I don't claim any sort of credit for this image. It is kind of cool to think that these poets can still be making art long after they are passed.

I reached out to @ericvancewalton to see if he had played with AI Art yet. He hadn't, but now he has jumped squarely down the rabbit hole. Check out his latest post for more information on that.

Next, I decide to try one of my own again. I type in "camping under the stars while the world succumbs to oblivion".

I love how it gives you for renditions of what it thinks you might want. The other cool part is you can pick one of them and "upsize" it if you want like this:

Or, you can pick one of them had have it do four more variations on that image. Like this:

In this one I asked for variations on the first image. I haven't been able to figure out yet, just how it understands the words that you pick. Clearly there is a glow of fires on the horizon in these, so I think it understands my intent with oblivion, but I don't really know if it got succumbs. I guess one could say the fire is consuming everything so that might be close, but part of me feels like succumb just became a throw away word in this case.

The same holds true with my first image and the use of the word "disowned". I'm not really sure the AI got what I was going for there, but I am not sure if that is a flaw in the AI, or I just didn't pick a good word.

I decided to give my brain a rest for a bit and go back to a source that was from another person. I picked one of my favorite lines from a Counting Crows song and I typed it into the generator.

"imagine/ time expands and then contracts"

It gave me this image above. I honestly don't know what I was expecting, but I can't say I am disappointed with this. There is definitely something surreal about most of the art that MidJourney generates. Sure, you can get some hyper realistic stuff, but most of it has this safe aesthetic to it.

I took a couple days break and then I decided to jump back into it. This time I used a poem that I have been working on for a while now. I only have a couple of lines, but I decided to throw those in and see what came up.

sliver of moon
dashboard glow
solitary reflection
infinite low

Again, in this case I kind of feel like the word dashboard was a throw away word. Perhaps if I had chosen a variation on one of the imagines it would have filled in a bit more, but at this point I am not seeing it. That isn't to say I don't like it. I am actually really happy with what it generated, I am just not sure if it really captured what I was looking for.

I think the least likely fit is definitely #1.

Finally, I decided to go for something a little more science fiction. Well, fantasy mixed with science fiction I guess.

"a Spanish galleon gliding across the waves of redshift on the edge of a blackhole"

As you can see, it tried pretty hard, but from what I can see, the Spanish galleon seemed to be a bit of a throw away.

Until that is I chose to do a variation on the first image. This is where it became pretty clear to me how powerful that variation tool can be.

In fact, I loved the image so much, I upscaled the copy of the variation that it created. It is pretty awesome if you ask me. What do you think?

I am not sure what I am going to do when my free trial runs out. I am going to be very tempted to pay the money to keep generating stuff. I can already tell my wife is sick of me talking about this. I honestly probably haven't been this excited about something since I first started getting into crypto.

I don't think this is a career changer for me, but I definitely feel more empowered to "create" art now and not sell myself short. If my words and a little AI can generate something this beautiful, I must be doing something right!

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All pictures/screenshots taken by myself or @mrsbozz unless otherwise sourced