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.
One of the fun non-work-related things that happens on LinkedIn is the "Saturday Monster Challenge", a fun AI art meme where every Saturday this one guy picks a monster-related theme and people make generative art monster images about it. Today, as I write this, the theme was "Mustache Monsters", for "Movember", a global campaign where men grow mustaches to raise awareness of men's health issues.
It seemed like fun. I of course, couldn't stop with just one.
I had a lot of fun making the featured image for the article "Resurrecting the <BLINK> tag". Here's some of the also-rans.
Working on a featured image for my writeup on How the Section 174 Tax Code Changes Caused a White-Collar Job Crash, I tried to create an artistic representation of tech businesses being crushed under tax code changes. Along the way, I generated some striking images that didn't quite fit what I wanted for the post, but which I nonetheless liked enough to tuck away in this gallery of leftovers. Here's the also-ran images for that article.
Painted faces, paintings of faces — an exploration of fantastic portraits and fantastic art. (Titled with apologies to the shade of David Bowie.)
Just some photos from my cross-country vacation.
Funny how different vacation photos sometimes are from how you remember things being. Guess I should have used a camera instead of an AI.
Still, some of them really are surprisingly accurate to how things really were.
Pink Floyd's album "Animals", for me, might stand alone as the most singular achievement of the rock 'n' roll era. I've always argued that Pink Floyd were not a rock band, but the first act of what several decades later eventually came to be called "post-rock"—musicians grounded in the language and conventions of rock but doing their own thing with it—and never did they push the boundaries of rock music further from its beginnings, while still staying true to its basic visceral nature (this is, after all, a genre of music named after a slang term for fucking) than on "Animals". Culminating their epic series of classic 1970s albums, each of which further developed the musical experiments of the last, "Animals" was about as far as they, or anyone, would ever take it without completely untethering from…
Another AI generative art project. I recently was experimenting with creating some work-themed images. I didn't come up with anything I could use on my FileMaker consulting website, but I did wind up generating a couple of interesting galleries. Here's three of them:
Some people really get into their work
II. Your Dream JobWhere do you see yourself in five years?
III. Model EmployeesSurrealist stock photography, basically
Robyn Hitchcock used to have an email fan club that I was pretty active in (hence his name coming up a bunch of places on this site; if you're familiar with his songs, it makes sense that he gives people ideas for art.)
Back in, geez, 2003 or 4, I think, he turned 50 so we got together and all contributed a bunch of art to give to him on a CD-rom. This was my contribution, about 12 pages of scanner art (including the somewhat difficult task of getting a good digital scan of a lit candle!) Use the skull, suitcase, and bottle of wine on the right to navigate through the panels.
(Note: at narrower window widths, the navigation icons on the right side of each page below might get cut off and you will need to either widen your browser window, or scroll to the right to see…
As I worked on my "Revisions Of Johanna" project, I generated a lot of images I really liked, but which didn't fit into the final project. I decided the best of them deserved their own gallery.
This page is a work in progress, I just kind of threw it up to get me started. I have plenty more images to sort through from this, plus I need to pare down these already posted ones to just the most interesting ones. But, still, you can get a good sense of what went on behind the scenes here, and hopefully, an understanding of why I didn't just want these putative rejects to sit unused forever on my hard drive.
One additional note about the content of these images in the context of social awareness: For anyone interested, I addressed some thoughts about sexism and bias in…
I don't draw as much as I used to, these are a couple of things I salvaged from my ancient other site. I'll add more as I run across them.
I have to be honest. I don't know about this one.
I set out to do another set of AI-assisted lyric illustrations, this time all of one song in its entirety... Bob Dylan's "Visions Of Johanna".
I got a little ways into it, and it was going well, when a few times in a row the generative algorithm overemphasized cats I had added as incidental background elements in the prompt, to interesting effect. So I had the brilliant idea: let's illustrate the whole song with cats. I backtracked and started over again.
It was an instructive lesson, one that didn't turn out as well as I had hoped.
It's just hard to get a lot of variety out of the Stable Diffusion XL algorithm when the main subject is cats. Turns out, visually, cats are really not a very expressive medium. And especially…
While working on a featured image for Field Report: Briefing On My Weekend, I had the idea of extending the theme to make a whole set of illustrations inspired by my travels around California's natural areas. I wound up doing a whole mess of them. These are experimental, but I like the idea and the way the experiments worked came out, so I may follow up on this. There's a lot of them, I'm going to sit with this a while and probably then cut this gallery down to a more manageable size.
Because these sprung from an effort to illustrate a post with twilight fantasy elements, you may encounter some unsettling phantoms or backwoods beasties here and there. Just make sure to keep all your fingers inside your browser windows and you should be ok.
This is a series of generative art images I am paticularly fond of. Originally these were going to be part of my RobGAN Hitchcock project, but they kind of stand on their own. Created with Stable Diffusion.
For a while, I had a Twitter account, @robGANhitchock, where I was posting AI illustrations of Robyn Hitchcock lyrics I created using a Generative Adversarial Network ("GAN"). This was an interesting project, because when it started I knew next to nothing about generative art; as I worked on it I learned more about crafting prompts, and more and better tools emerged, so over the course of the full set, you can see the progression of experience and improved generative algorithms: from the first few in VQGAN, then FreewayML,…
Angel trumpets and devil trombones, and you are invited! Here's some phantasmagorical music-themed generative AI illustrations I, well, generated.
These were, by the way, generated with Dall-E 2.5, which is sadly no longer available. All public instances have been replaced with Dall-E 3 which is much more literal, produces crisp, more concrete and digital-looking or often cartoonish images, and is not good for abstraction or "sloppier" images. I remain hopeful Dall-E 2.5 will become available again, or a future version will allow the use of prompts again that can facilitate generating more obscure, impressionistic, and stylistically varied output.
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