30 Comments

My graphic artist husband, who is typically cynical about AI, thought these were quite impressive. (He has played with Midjourney, however.)

What fun!

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Tell him thanks! And you too. :)

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Inspired choices! The first thought that popped when I saw the Godzilla sketches was the attorney asking him “Can you point out the assailant here in the court room (in his best Perry Mason voice) and Godzilla pointing awkwardly with his right forelimb and doing the ‘roar’ sound, clearing the gallery.

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That's exactly what happened! :)

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Cthulhu as shown is aerodynamically unsound. The wings need to be *much* bigger, with huge pectorals to pull them.

Unless the wings of Cthulhu are vestigial, of course. I confess I have to google (well, to Bing) whether Cthulhu flies. Ambiguous answer: it says he does by virtue of his “godlike” strength, which might make irrelevant the size of the pectoral muscles, and if magic is involved the wings. I’m going to assume not. Later edit: Maybe he comes from somewhere with much weaker gravity and a much thicker atmosphere, like Venus.

One thing I don’t have to assume—one thing that seems to be well-established—is Cthulhu’s pronouns. He is a he/him. So why does Potter dress him, if at all, in a blue dress?

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Gary Larson drew a Far Side cartoon featuring penguins on an ice flow, with a polar bear in the middle, wearing a party hat on his face as a beak to fool the penguins into thinking he was one of them. He was flooded with indignant letters telling him that penguins are strictly Antarctic and polar bears are strictly Arctic, thus making the scene impossible. Of course, he said, bears wearing party-hat beaks is perfectly plausible. Similarly, he did one with a suburban house being vacuumed by a giant mosquito wearing a frilly apron. Her suited husband, wearing a fedora, was coming in the front door telling her that he was exhausted from his day of work. "I must have spread malaria over half the county today!" he said. Again, in came the indignant letters asking, "Are you unaware that it is the FEMALE mosquito that spreads disease????" He said, "Oh. That's a problem, but to these people, it's perfectly fine that mosquitoes live in houses, use vacuum cleaners, wear human clothing, and speak English. You and I can't BEGIN to understand how Cthulhu does the things he does. As for the blue dress, you'll have to ask Cthulhu himself, or Beatrix Potter. :)

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Larson’s critics seem to have a problem with the concept “given the givens”; given the basic premises of the fiction, what details don’t fit? Economic modeling is full of such stuff, as is ordinary imagination. Their problem is that they are complaining not about details but the givens of the cartoons.

Does a Beatrix Potter representation of Cthulhu *entail* stubby wings? Is that a given? Or is it a detail that doesn’t fit?

As to Cthulhu’s feminine side, I was hoping you would pass the query to the AI. They answer queries, don’t they? Unless the question is politically incorrect, like, “Do you know a joke about a woman?”

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I'm afraid the set of "things AI will not discuss" is very nearly identical to the set of "things I want to know."

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hahahaha

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Very nice. I should have started by saying something nice. If I have a weakness, it is a tendency to be hyper-critical. (But please: nobody call me a hypercrit.)

I especially like Bullwinkle and Godzilla, if only for my affection for the subject (in the former case) and my wife’s (in the latter).

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I enjoyed your query, as always. Glad you and she like Bullwinkle and Godzilla. Similarly, I'm the big Bullwinkle fan in our house, and Alanna is the Godzilla fan. (Though we both like both.)

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As it so happened, my professor of intellectual property was Lawrence Pretty, who, among other distinctions, was the lawyer for the movies’ biggest star: Godzilla. He (Pretty, not Godzilla) shared a story from protecting the intellectual property of Toho Co., Ltd., that was instructive about the Ninth Circuit.

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I had some students start with an essay generated by ChatGPT and rewrite it. The rewrites consistently were better. I wonder what would happen if an artist could do the same thing with AI generated images?

One noticeable thing is the amount of clutter in AI images. I remember in the late 90's when I was using a program to generate landscapes of the Grand Canyon. Images took a couple of minutes to generate and I'd been struggling, really struggling to get it right. Finally I realized that my palette was too complicated, that was the key. I used them in animation - it took several days to generate 30 seconds. I started making progress when I got a CD writer - at $7 a CD.

Today the images have lost their luster, but then they were incredible.

https://youtu.be/yALVY5IG2DA?si=t5eMkJGK-ChADc-C

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They are cluttered. Kind of Victorian-mansion-level cluttered. 40+ years ago, Alanna and I visited Olana--an artist's residence on the Hudson River. It was decorated in High Victorian--and the look was suffocating.

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Maybe you should have a column with five simple ways to enhance your Midjourney or Craiyon image. Might be a best-seller.

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That would be hard. There are many, many steps involved. It I’ll think about it. Thanks! (Our conversation was the inspiration behind this post.)

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I really, really like the abstract botanicals!

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I did, too. The intricate geometry impressed me.

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Cthulu by Beatrix Potter. Awesome.

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I've gotten a number of comments on that one. :)

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A few months back I asked some AI outfit to show me Napoleon III. 1808 to 1873 I think. The Emperor of the French 1852-70. That one! Let's see if I can attach the result---which looked almost totally unlike the REAL Napoleon III (Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, also the first and only President of the Second Republic. Here goes...whoops! you don't allow attachments! I was expecting to be shown a photograph of Napoleon III stolen from Wikipedia..

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The AI programs are TERRIBLE with getting specific, real-life faces right. Sometimes, they are ASTONISHINGLY bad. (And no, Substack doesn’t allow attachments.) Thanks!

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Thanks for starting my day with a chuckle! Clever you, as always. I enjoyed the comments almost as much as the images!

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Happy to please. :) Thanks for the nice comments.

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Oh, these are fun! Particularly the Beatrix Potter Chthulus.

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Yeah … gotta admit … I really love that one, too. :)

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I have also been experimenting with Dall-E, Midjourney, and Copilot to make anachronistic art. I create a weekly graphic novel so I can track the improvement of the AI in real time. As you said, the steps to make an image are still complex, time-consuming, and ever changing! https://writtenbyrobots.substack.com/p/this-memoir-will-be-written-by-robots

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Very nice site!! As a futurist, you make one big error. You set your piece in 2028. That's soon enough for people to remember the piece and say, "Ah! She got that wrong." Better to set it in 2128 or in some unstated year so that you can never be proven wrong. (I am just kidding you.)

In my days as an economic forecaster, there was a facetious bit of folk wisdom that said, "Make sure you are hazy about either the date or the quantity of your forecast. That way, you'll never be demonstrably wrong."

I have an illustrative story. Someone told me that his friend dated a woman for a few years and said to him one day, "I'll bet you're going to marry her someday." His friend said, "I'll bet you I'm not." And they shook hands and bet something like $100. A few years later, the romance had ended and his friend married a different woman. At the wedding, the groom said, "You need to pay me that $100 now." His friend said, "No I don't. I haven't lost the bet yet."

(I suspect I'll use this story in a column soon.)

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Hahaha. I set it in 2028 to give an idea of how soon I think some of these things are coming. But perhaps when I edit the final project I will take out the exact dates. I also have a dystopian novel series and that is set in 2110, so I understand your point.

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:)

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