Mike Kupietz’s experiments with generative art made with AI tools. Beautiful and strange visual images to trick the mind and and tickle the senses.
Artist’s statement: “I do a lot of experimentation with trendy AI generative art apps such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. These allow you do specify a picture of what you want, and will generate something they think it’s statistically likely you’re asking for.
“I’ve always been interested in using algorithms to augment and even collaborate with in my art, both visual and musical, since working in 1987 with the fondly remembered Joel Chadabe, an early pioneer in algorithmic composition, for whom I ran SUNY Albany’s electronic music studio for two years and worked with at his algorithmic composition software company, Intelligent Computer Music Systems.
“Even before the boom in AI in recent years, I was writing and using apps to algorithmically reinterpret and expand my ideas in both music and visual art. However, the recent boom in what’s technically known as ‘Generative Adversarial Networks’, AI image generators in short, has made it easier than ever to produce very convincing and complex images. I’ve had a blast playing with them in the last year or two.”
Here are some additional images I created while working on the featured image for March 2026 Indieweb Carnival piece "Museum Memories".
Article syndication: Fediverse
Posted for a friend, here's all the sets of images I generated working on "You Can Tuna Oddfellow, But….", from which the final gallery was selected.
These are some character studies I did of Tuna Oddfellow, the famous Second Life (and, increasingly, real life) alter ago of an old friend.
This is a bit of a long gallery, usually I'd generate a bunch of these and narrow it down to just the favorites. Haven't done that with this yet.
Some virtual spectral photography to spookify your Halloween. True fact: none of these AI-generated images had ghosts in them when I prompted them. WoooOOOOoooo! 👻
I believe I originally made these as a Saturday Monster Challenge but I can't recall when. I'll update if I run across the original info.
The LinkedIn Saturday Monster Challenge for July 5, 2025 was '"Too Hot To Handle" Monsters'.
After consideration, I decided not to post this gallery on LinkedIn.
The idea of a "monster"-themes art challenge on a professional site has always been a funny one, and while most people (including myself) usually create work-safe images, the fact is, as a kid raised on horror movies—I was babysat by channel 11's "Chiller Theatre" from the age of 6—occasionally I wind up, just by following my muse, doing something a little more unflinching.
Sometimes some of the images are... well, they're never terribly offensive, but sometimes I feel like they're just a little strong or perhaps a hair darker than I want to post in front of unsuspecting professional networkers or prospective employers.
That happened in this case.
They're not that objectionable, but some of the images were…
This week's LinkedIn Saturday Monster Challenge generative art theme was "Deleted Scene Monsters": show the monsters that ended up on the cutting room floor.
And so, I am pleased to present these rare stills from the original cut of "Casablanca" (1942)—starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman as star-crossed former lovers in a classic tale of wartime romance set against a background of mind-bending supernatural horrors, when a mysterious event causes the gates of Hell to yawn wide and the inhabitants to amble forth across the living earth. (Original tagline: "From Hell... to Casablanca... to YOUR Town!")
Unfortunately, test audiences didn't respond well, and studio executives said the macabre elements were "distracting" and ordered it recut to emphasize more of the drama and romance, and less of the shrieking souls of the long dead.
The bowdlerized re-cut became the familiar excellent but sadly not-at-all-terrifying non-monster film…
The Saturday Monster Challenge on LinkedIn for June 21 2025 was "Eternal Rise Monsters". I took the theme and decided to do Phoenixes (Phoenices? Phoenixen?), as in "rising from the ashes."
These were some illustrations I whipped up trying to come up with a header image for an article I wrote on LinkedIn asking about people's real-life experiences with using AI tools.
The #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme for March 1, 2025 was "Element Monsters". I went with radioactive elements: uranium, radium, plutonium, caesium, thorium, einsteinium, radon, and americium.
On Saturday, Feb 15, 2025, the theme of LinkedIn's "Saturday Monster Challenge" was "Love Monsters".
I apologize to anybody with delicate sensibilities offended by the inclusion of a few monster menage-a-troises. I live in San Francisco, these things happen. Also for the sadness of the final picture, a forlorn monster left waiting alone in the moonlight for a monster love who isn't coming. Unfortunately, in the real world, monster love doesn't always work out.
Saturday Monster Challenge for Jan. 18, 2024.
Comes a time when the monsters have eaten their fill of villagers and there’s no danger anymore, so now everybody can come out and enjoy a sunny day, romping and frolicking under clear blue skies and rainbows.
The time for divisiveness and fear is over. It's time to let go of the past, join together as a community, humans and monsters together, full of hope and looking forward to a bright future of fun, friendship, and happy times together.
At least until the monsters start to feel hungry again.
Just a set of fun leftover from when I was working on a featured image for my Local Color: New York Stories, Which I only now realize are all about petty crimes page. My cousin likes them.
A stylistic experiment inspired by vintage art photography.
#SaturdayMonsterChallenge on LinkedIn for 11 Jan 2024 theme was "Fog Monsters".
.
This week's #SaturdayMonsterChallenge on LinkedIn is Lucky Charm Monsters.
I always say, you can tell the lucky charm monsters, because they're the ones hanging out with the people winning at the casino tables, as opposed to the ones slipping roofies into people's drinks at the bar, snarfing up the king crab legs at the all-you-can eat buffet, or hanging out in the bathrooms scaring the bejesus out of you.
Submission for the Mood Board and Fashion categories of the Wrapped In Pink AI generative art competition, Dec 2024.
These people are lit, yo.
They've been doing this "#WrappedInPink Challenge" generative art meme on LinkedIn. Here's just a preview of studies of some things I've been working on for it. Not entirely sure what direction I'm going to go in yey.
This gallery deals with the unavoidable stereotypes of femininity that one encounters using some current generative art tools ca. 2024.
Being trained on a society's art, there are two possibilities for generative visual art software: it can hold an unflinching mirror up to that society, including reiterating its existing biases; or its creators can seek to consciously tilt the output to favor what they deem to be better choices, which opens the whole project up to accusations, and let's face it, perhaps the reality, of introducing other biases. The unfortunate truth is that at the time, people never thought to question making art that almost exclusively reinforced certain notions (of femininity, or anything else). They did not consider themselves to be biased. So too, despite the most admirable intentions, it's honestly a valid question whether or not current attempts to right historical wrongs are undoing bias,…
The revolution isn't over.
A cousin of mine was helping work on a volume of poetry and asked if I had more images specifically of San Francisco or New York City in the style of “Wild California” Studies — AI Generative Art gallery that they could consider for inclusion. I didn't, but I whipped some up.
I'm pretty fond of how a lot of them turned out, but, as with so many of these projects, I wound up making many that are visually striking but don't really have much artistic value beyond that, and the work remains to be done to winnow down all the striking images to the ones that really are special.
Until then, I'm so fond of them, though, that I thought I'd give a preview. Here's the complete output of those experiments, awaiting the best of it being culled down into the final presentation.
Right now…
Someone on social media asked for AI interpretations of Santa Claus. I couldn't resist such low-hanging fruit.
As usual, when doing my gallery for #SaturdayMonsterChallenge — "Winter Monster", there were a ton of images left over that I liked but didn't make the cut, or weren't quite unique enough, or didn't fit the theme. There are those.
Saturday, Dec. 7, 2024’s #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme on LinkedIn is "Winter Monster". Here's what I did.
Working on the #SaturdayMonsterChallenge "A Connecticut Sasquatch In King Arthur's Court" I created a lot of extra images that I liked a lot, but which either didn't fit the theme quite right, or were too similar to others, or too different. Here are some of those.
My friend Hellena Banner (from whom I cribbed the title of this gallery, with apologies) was doing a project where she was trying to put Goths in the least Goth-like situation possible. I took up the challenge.
Saturday, Nov. 30, 2024's #SaturdayMonsterChallenge theme on LinkedIn is "Time Travelling Monsters".
Here's my interpretation: "A Connecticut Sasquatch In King Arthur's Court".
I posted The Contents Of The Rest Of The World’s Dream Do Not Concern Me (or, Why I Didn’t Turn 40) and Day Nights at around the same time, and in making the featured images, used Stable Diffusion XL to create a bunch of images that I'm kind of fond of, all around the themes of time and calendars. Here's the leftovers.
For confused first-time visitors and other people still acclimating, here is a description of these little tabs to the left, as well as some other features of the site.
Open "Expert Mode" CLI Navigation - this give you the option to switch your browser's display to an old-fashioned terminal mode where you may browse this site, view pages and images by typing text commands. Just like how we used to browse the web back in 1978!
Open Visual Settings - This gives you controls to customize the visual display of this website to your liking: turn up or down the brightness, contrast, color temperature, hue, saturation, dark mode, and earthquake. Settings are saved per browser tab, so they will be remembered for your whole visit.
Open My Eyes - Have you ever been engrossed in your work, when you suddenly realize someone is staring at your screen, watching everything you do over your shoulder? If not, this simulates the experience.
Open Help - This help popup, silly! You just clicked it! Do you not remember?
New - Draggable elements! Several elements on this website, including these tabs, this popup message, and the "Hire Mike" badge in the lower right, can be dragged around with your mouse, to avoid them blocking content. Positions are remembered per tab, so as you navigate around the site, they will stay in the same place for your whole visit.
Enjoy!
Are you sure you want to switch to viewing this website in the "expert mode" command-line interface?
This will switch to a terminal emulator, load this page, and allow you to browse this website and view its contents by typing text commands.
Plus there might be, y'know, some fun stuff hidden in there. Just for geeks.