Invasion of the AI Body Snatchers!
We are not alone.
Hi there! This is VIJEV. Have you noticed a slight change in the look and feel of TechComedyLife? Well, I’ve discovered AI art! What is AI art you might ask? At this stage of development, it is an art form that AI generates based on text prompts. It is “coding with words”. I’ve had oodles of fun for the last 3 months testing it out. I have tried two popular platforms, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. I chose Midjourney for my art as it suited my curiosity. So if you type in “duck made of wood”, you get this:
After so much trial and error, I have discovered a style that I love and that is vintage retro sci-fi artwork with a dash of paranormal and horror! The famed author, H.P. Lovecraft, wrote immense works of fiction that combined themes of horror and science fiction. He would love Midjourney because, like his work, it requires creative wordplay to help the AI create what you want to see. This means you need to be quite descriptive and the way you describe the art you want could be the difference between a dud or an inspiring masterpiece. Let’s take my art style and we can finally imagine the menacing creatures that crossed the event horizon to steal your soul out of this dimension and into the macabre realm of cosmic horror!
This is a breakthrough in concept art creation and a form of storytelling that can assist people to connect and communicate. A form of creation before only available if you knew how to create them yourself or had the Hollywood budget to afford one. Concept art is now accessible to all who can use a computer with an internet connection. You can now build characters and environments that suit your style and vision that would have only existed within the depths of your hidden imaginations. Is this our imaginary world coming true? Well not quite, there’s still a while to go for something like this before we can create realized worlds that will someday allow us to interact in real-time with characters that have their own personalities. Tools such as these will make everyone an artist because real art is from the mind and not your ability to hold a pencil. This, of course, wasn’t without criticism, as many, including other artists, complained that this wasn’t “real art” or that it’s a computer mashing art from real artists and allows tech companies to make money from it instead of benefiting the original artists.
This will become an intellectual quandary but there’s a solution. If anyone makes money using the inspiration of another artist, provide them with a commission to the said artist every time they are referenced and sold. This can create scalable revenue for original artists in the future. This was the idea of NFTs as conceived but there are still inherent problems with how it’s meant to be used and it wasn’t preventing the theft of art at all. There’s still some work to do in creating secure digital assets that can protect digital art. For example, the art that you see in this article is based on my own parameters and I’m not using specific artistic references, e.g. Moebius, who created surreal sci-fi art that was quite unique. I can use his art style to create something I wanted. For example, let’s create a piece of art called: cerebral freedom of artificial intelligence in the style of Moebius. Midjourney gives me the following:
Let’s do the same in the style of Zdzisław Beksiński who created the most surreal horror paintings during his prolific artistic life. Midjourney gives me this:
How about someone you might recognize? Let’s try Van Gogh:
And finally, the same in my own style with Midjourney:
In the meantime, I got to work and created over 5000 iterations of various images as I got to play and experiment with this technology, waiting to see what it would produce based on the creative wordplay I could muster. I created a world called Caldopia, with inspirations from retro vintage sci-fi themes mixed in with some horror, psychological, and paranormal themes.
This technology allows me to create environments where these imaginative people and creatures would live. What would the universe of Caldopia look like? With the theme in mind, I would envision an outlandish world different from the usual environments we are used to in modern sci-writing. What does a world look like where the protagonist of the story would uncover the sacred ancient key to unlock forbidden digital dreams, unfathomable for robots and other creatures to comprehend?
The use of generative AI art will give people a powerful tool for connecting, marketing, and creating new narratives in ways that weren't before feasible or widely accessible.
Who can predict what will happen after this? I have a lot of enthusiasm and optimism for this kind of technology. The uncertainty makes the future intriguing, and I'm looking forward to being surprised. What will it signify for contemporary human artists? There is no turning back from this now. The value of human-made art will increase as these tools become more widespread.
How about something a little light-hearted to conclude this article? Have you heard of Hot Tub Time Machine? It’s another sci-fi movie that has its own cult-like following and was used as a reference to how time travel would work in the Marvel Avengers movie.
