This is a fantastic experiment. The images are really haunting and ask for a backstory for them. Would love to play with midjourney myself in the future. Also, I'm impressed with how you orchestrated Borges' passages around the idea, great job. For a second, I felt cheated and fascinated at the same time :D
I wonder, how common it will be to use the sequence - a text prompt, an AI-generated image for it, writing a story about it (there's already textual Magic Realism Bot on Twitter people including myself are trying to use as prompts, quite fun). Some people might see this as an utterly wrong approach that 'replaces' the imagination but I think they would be wrong. At least, you still need to come up with a prompt, then you need a picture that would spark imagination, then you need to see a viable pattern there, something that you can turn into a story, and only then if you're lucky you can build upon it. But it's no different from how the fiction writing process has been working for me personally. Often my mind just grabs a completely random and bizarre idea (oh, let's write a story about wojak brain meme, or what if an adtech-haunted guy in a tinfoil hat visits Hitler in the hell to talk about marketing, etc.). In any case, ideas themselves are cheap unless implemented. I have a big backlog of things I want to write about but I doubt I'll ever close it. AI can make countless images for every entry in it and I wonder if they will be helpful to make the craziest ideas alive, or the opposite – misdirecting from the original premise, more 'human' sort of imagination. Regardless, the hardest part is writing an actual story based on the idea / prompt / image, on which I think you agree with me :D Let's way till GPT-something can write stories based on midjourney's images. That would be fun to watch at least.
P.S. I'll email you for story titles (I have some guesses, at least after rereading I vaguely recognised some of the passages)
Jun 22, 2022·edited Jun 22, 2022Liked by Roger’s Bacon
Monica Belevan over at Covidian Aesthetics had a good piece last week, describing the similarities between AI art generators and surrealist practice. Various blendings of human and AI, in different combinations and weights, have quite a lot of potential worth researching.
Great and exciting stuff, thanks for sharing! Will read. I also think there are similarities between the two. AI pretty much might serve as a sort of ‘psychedelics for the m***verse’ or whatnot 🤷 Imagine watching midjourney’s output in VR.
Hope to see Erik Hoel comment on this since he dislikes the idea of AI "art". I, for one, find real-life is often sufficiently nasty and don't seek out horror. But I applied for a beta account on Midjourney anyway. I think your post is pretty inspired and worked well.
This is a fantastic experiment. The images are really haunting and ask for a backstory for them. Would love to play with midjourney myself in the future. Also, I'm impressed with how you orchestrated Borges' passages around the idea, great job. For a second, I felt cheated and fascinated at the same time :D
I wonder, how common it will be to use the sequence - a text prompt, an AI-generated image for it, writing a story about it (there's already textual Magic Realism Bot on Twitter people including myself are trying to use as prompts, quite fun). Some people might see this as an utterly wrong approach that 'replaces' the imagination but I think they would be wrong. At least, you still need to come up with a prompt, then you need a picture that would spark imagination, then you need to see a viable pattern there, something that you can turn into a story, and only then if you're lucky you can build upon it. But it's no different from how the fiction writing process has been working for me personally. Often my mind just grabs a completely random and bizarre idea (oh, let's write a story about wojak brain meme, or what if an adtech-haunted guy in a tinfoil hat visits Hitler in the hell to talk about marketing, etc.). In any case, ideas themselves are cheap unless implemented. I have a big backlog of things I want to write about but I doubt I'll ever close it. AI can make countless images for every entry in it and I wonder if they will be helpful to make the craziest ideas alive, or the opposite – misdirecting from the original premise, more 'human' sort of imagination. Regardless, the hardest part is writing an actual story based on the idea / prompt / image, on which I think you agree with me :D Let's way till GPT-something can write stories based on midjourney's images. That would be fun to watch at least.
P.S. I'll email you for story titles (I have some guesses, at least after rereading I vaguely recognised some of the passages)
Monica Belevan over at Covidian Aesthetics had a good piece last week, describing the similarities between AI art generators and surrealist practice. Various blendings of human and AI, in different combinations and weights, have quite a lot of potential worth researching.
https://covidianaesthetics.substack.com/p/kunstlosigkeit-or-fully-algorithmic?r=farwk&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Great and exciting stuff, thanks for sharing! Will read. I also think there are similarities between the two. AI pretty much might serve as a sort of ‘psychedelics for the m***verse’ or whatnot 🤷 Imagine watching midjourney’s output in VR.
A short story I wrote recently slightly touches upon AI-generated art and psychedelics https://www.ioann.xyz/p/the-testimony-of-sixth-the-second
Hope to see Erik Hoel comment on this since he dislikes the idea of AI "art". I, for one, find real-life is often sufficiently nasty and don't seek out horror. But I applied for a beta account on Midjourney anyway. I think your post is pretty inspired and worked well.