Back in Jan 2023 I somehow got it into my head that I should investigate or at least have a look at what all the fuss was about in relation to AI and Generative Image making. I didn’t understand it in the slightest and was less than impressed with the idea of instructing some new fangled software to make me an image of ‘X’. What was the point, I can draw, paint, print, photograph and work across a range of CGI software and digital compositing software. Why should i bother with AI? Somehow the wheel turned and I found myself thinking that I could tackle the beast head on and do something different with it. Being then rebel that I am it came to me that i should fashion prompts along the lines of creating problems for the AI software to solve. Otherwise it’s just same ol’ same ol’.

So down one rabbit hole after another to try and get to the bottom of how to go about setting my mischief into place. At the time the hot topic was intellectual property theft, mainly from photographers and digital artists. I knew enough to know that this was a bit of a dark horse and a furphy to boot, but it gave me the leg up that I needed. What kind of images / image data won’t have been picked by the web crawlers trawling online storage and social media platforms; in brief, what sort of images don’t exist. That got my imagination working and the first prompts were quickly being tested. The thing is, I want to be surprised, I don’t want the result to be expected or predictable and this is where I also found a working companion in GANN’s (Generative Adversarial Neural Networks). Despite the often (but not always) superior generative quality of software like Stable Diffusion, Dall-e and Mid Journey I found the results to be too predictable and often a bit lame when a particular ‘style’ was applied.

My journey begins with Wombo AI out of Canada. Here are a random selection of some of the earliest images from back in Jan 2023.