So Midjourney has Yet Another New Version of their main engine, called “5.1”, and it’s very much like v5, except that it has more of a “house style” like 4.0 did, which can be turned off via “–style raw”. (There’s also “–stylize”, and one might think that ”–style raw” and say “–stylize 0” would do the same thing, but apparently not. It’s all magic.)
I have, as ever, been playing with it extensively (given that “relax mode” GPU time is free at my membership level, any time when the engine is not working for me is wasted, eh what?), and am now up somewhere over forty thousand images, most recently involving things like echidnas (apparently not “echidnae”; “is Sonic an Echidna?“) and many stills from non-existent movies. I will present here a number from a 1960s Psychodrama of Eldritch Suspense, because woot! (See also The Cult Hit of 1977.)
Brad and Laura are concernedDr. Martin and Miss Carter are also concerned.Miss Carter appreciates Dr. Martin’s collection of exotic curios.Patrons in the village pub are concerned. And not only about the ugly picture.Mrs. Martin is perhaps too impressed by the obsidian statue.“Joannie, what –” “Please, Go, Through, The, Door, Doctor, Martin”“Praise, The, Tentacles” “Yes, The, Wonderful, Tentacles”“Come, Back, Soon”
(I like how exactly one of the eight images I made came out in color.)
“Chav” is a British-adjacent word, usually derogatory, for a cluster of concepts involving economically and socially disadvantaged classes, youth, sneering, hanging about in groups in public, and so on. It may be offensive in some sense; it’s not like we have a lot of non-derogatory and non-offensive words for young people in disadvantaged classes. I hope and trust I am not offending simply by using it, for instance, in a weblog post title.
Anyway! For no particular reason I gave Midjourney (version 5) a number of chav-related prompts, and here are some of the results. These are mostly photorealistic, as that’s what v5 often produces unless explicitly prompted otherwise (so this isn’t “AI Art” so much as “AI Weirdness”). And I’m putting them in the weblog here just for fun. (For some highlights of other stuff I’ve been making in MJ, albeit without prompts or much commentary, see me on Pixelfed.)
Here for instance are some Cute Chavs (i.e. the prompt was “cute chavs” with some flags and stuff):
Mildly cute, and certainly numerous! Note the three red caps. Note also that Midjourney v5 has really improved in the people department: some of the faces may dissolve into blurs, some of them disquieting, if you zoom up too much, but no one appears to have seven fingers on the same hand, or any obvious extra limbs. Which is impressive!
Additional cute chavs:
Here “chav” might be a mildly negative comment on their taste in accessories and hair dye; not sure. Awfully cute, though.
Additionally:
These may be the “tough young men” sort of chavs, although the bright pink and blue hoodies and those sunglasses are perhaps atypical.
Also supposed cute chavs:
Certainly cute, but those matching raincoats and GKSY VHIS caps look pretty upscale; it may have strayed a bit from chavery here, but, again, certainly cute. And perhaps truculent.
Further cute chavs, who have perhaps looted a cargo of loud plaids (but who all seem to have the right number of fingers and extremities, again!):
There are various more cute chavs, but we’ll finish this section with this one:
I tend to think of your basic chav as pale, perhaps because people who use the word “chav” often have other words for people who aren’t pale. These three are certainly impressive in their own way. Judgment of cuteness left to the reader.
Heavens, there are so many pictures that I’d love to share with you here! And that’s just these chav-related ones. So many thousands of pictures! See “Bach faucet“, relatedly. But anyway! Now we have some “chav life”:
No notes on that one. We got at least one other one like this except that they’re sitting on a stoop with equal truculence.
Additionally:
Perhaps “CY le HAWE” is the name of their YouTube channel, where they break cinder blocks on each other. For instance. (Do read the alt text on these images, by the way, if convenient; I put a lot of work into those!)
Asking for an artistic rendering of happy chavs, we got inter alia:
They don’t appear particularly happy to me, I admit.
On the other hand:
the Esposito Quadruplets here seem quite pleased by something.
Now this one:
doesn’t really say “chav” to me at all, due to the kilts and sporrans and so on; MJ may be improvising here. The people do look rather happy however.
In Ireland, chavs, or a group akin to chavs, are known as skangers (also possibly offensive). Prompted to picture skangers, Midjourney gave us:
The famous trio of Sakker, Sarkes, and Siakers. Sakker is notable for wearing the number “S”.
Next and relatedly:
Not sure of the relationship between skangers and ice hockey, frankly, but there we are. Perhaps it thinks it’s a typo for “Rangers”, which is a hockey thing.
Third “skangers” image:
Perhaps Gakkes(tm) soda is popular with skangers and/or chavs.
And finally in the skangers set:
“Oi, I’m goin’ down Skarnvers fer some baccy, yew wan’ anythin’ pet?”
(That was probably offensive, too.)
And finally, just so as not to overload my readers with offensive weird stuff, here are a few where we tried to mix chav with its opposite: posh.
This is the one that most obviously did that, but these two are clearly taking the piss, as it were, and on’v Chasd Heaish on top of it (the guy on the right looks familiar somehow).
We also got a fair number like:
which might be interpreted as a posh sort of chav, as well as say:
similarly (Americans perhaps, haha!). Also some where it seems to have mostly ignored the instructions and just given us two ordinary people, as in:
They’re just endearing! (Admittedly one may be missing a finger, but better that than two or three extra.) And not obviously chav or posh, so I’m not sure.
And to close, from the “a chav and posh person standing side by side” prompt:
Just a little more on the craziness from yesterday, and a comparison with Midjourney v5.
We chose another phoneme-triple to look at, “eaux saf aim”. In retrospect there are some words in there (French for “waters”, and English for “aim”), but that’s okay.
Using the magic from yesterday, with Midjourney v4 and “–no words,letters,text” and “–no face” (for that total weight of zero) and “–chaos 50 –ar 3:2”, we get the quite pleasing:
Whew, those are not easy to write alt text for!
And then we did exactly the same thing, only with “–v 5” to get the v5 engine, and it did the notably different:
This may be reflecting something about the internal “creativity” or “style” of the two engines.
Oh, hey! I should try the v5 one with the “stylize” level turned up. Let’s see, with “–stylize 999” we get:
So that’s a No :) it isn’t the –stylize setting.
From this experiment we can theorize that v4 dreams about weird surreal stuff, whereas v5 dreams about a household goods catalog.
I took it into my head for some reason to see what Midjourney would do with little sub-semantic phonemes, like say “ton glam so”. When I first tried it, the results had letters (and not-quite-letters) all over the and/or were all just faces, so I added the switches “–no words, letters, text –no face” to the prompt.
I did that as two separate –no switches without thinking, but in retrospect that may have resulted in a weight of one (1) for “ton glam so”, and weights of -0.5 each for “words, letters, text” and “face”, resulting in a total weight of zero (0), which is known to do weird / fun things (I thought I had mentioned that here earlier, but apparently not).
With those switches, our initial “ton glam so” produces the rather noteworthy:
Possibly the “glam” make “glamour” or even “glamor” salient in the model? But these are not, well, the images that I would have expected to be most salient under the category of “glamour”.
The same switches with the text prompt “so bel wip” produces the also, but very differently, noteworthy:
No relationship to “so bel wip” occurs to me, but it’s certainly consistent! Wondering if this was due to some common seed or something, I tried it again, and got:
which, whoa, definitely very similar. One more time for good luck?
I tried adding “–chaos 70”, which does something or other, and got this:
The same but just a bit more variety; two kids possibly white, one with pointy ears, and so on. But the same interesting clothes and general style. Fascinatin’!
I tried another text prompt (without the –chaos) “plin bo san”, and got these delightful things:
Does “plin bo san” make “plane” and maybe “boat” salient? Does “san” somehow specify the aesthetic? So fascinating! What if we change the aspect ratio to three wide by two high?
OMG so delightful. I love all of these! Next, I tried “tem wo sec” and…
I mean… what?!
Then, “lus dab ba” with –chaos 60:
“mai rem den” with –chaos 70:
Ahhhh what even is happening? What are all these things??
I’m stopping now because my brain is tired, and it’s challenging to write alt-text for these! But wow, eh? Whatever is going on with these things? These are all Midjourney v4, I’m pretty sure, because that’s the default at the moment and I didn’t specify. I’m guessing the total weight of zero is part of what’s causing… whatever this is.
Lost for decades, now rediscovered and presented here for the first time!
Mike and the GangThe Mysterious Mr. G in his Secret LabThe legal team in actionWhat is happening at St. Agnes?The OutsidersIn the kitchen at St. AgnesUnder ControlThe Discovery!
Courtesy, of course, of the early v5 version of Midjourney.
As I’m sure you’ve heard there’s a new level of GPT in the world. Friend Steve has been playing with it, and says that it does seem to do some stuff better, but also still make stuff up amusingly and all. At the moment for whatever reason I can’t be arsed to investigate, or even read yet more hype / analysis about it. Similarly, Google announced a thing, and Microsoft is putting LLMs into various products whose names I don’t recognize, and I’m not reading about any of that. NovelAI‘s good old open-source model works fine for all of the telling-weird-stories stuff that I need right now.
And there’s a test version of a new Midjourney engine out! Being tested! And it seems pretty cool. Hands in particular seem much more likely to have five fingers when you’d expect them too, which is a whole thing.
And I spent too much time arguing with people on the Twitter, which isn’t at all new. And I definitely shouldn’t do because it is not healthy. So I’m trying to stop that.
Now I’m just making pretty pictures! And not thinking very much until later on sometime!
Lots of weather in those, eh? Hadn’t noticed that. :)
On art made with AI tools, that is. Reuters story here, actual letter from the Office lawyer here.
I haven’t read the whole letter in detail yet (it’s long!) but I’ve looked it over and have Initial Thoughts:
I don’t think there’s a fact-of-the-matter here, about what is copyrightable when. There are legal theories that make more and less sense, that are more and less consistent with other established theories, and so on. But these are not theories that try to model something in the real world, like the Theory of Relativity; they are more theories in the sense of Set Theory. So the Office can’t really be right or wrong here overall, but they can have made a more or less sensible decision.
The overall finding of the memo is that Kristina Kashtanova still has a copyright on Zarya of the Dawn, but only on the text, and “the selection, coordination, and arrangement of the Work’s written and visual elements”, not on the visual elements themselves (i.e. the images made with Midjourney), because those images don’t involve “sufficient creative input or intervention from a human author.”
This seems wrong to me; as other places in the document point out, the case law says that “only a modicum of creativity is necessary”, and there is certainly a modicum of creativity in prompt design and engine usage.
The argument here seems to be, not that there isn’t enough creativity in the prompts and flags and so on, but that the connection between the artist’s input and the image output isn’t strong enough. The memo says things like ‘Rather than a tool that Ms. Kashtanova controlled and guided to reach her desired image, Midjourney generates images in an unpredictable way. Accordingly, Midjourney users are not the “authors” for copyright purposes of the images the technology generates.’
But where is the existing doctrine that says anything about predictability? Jackson Pollock might like a word, and the creator of any other roughly uncontrolled or algorithmic or found-object work. The theory here seems to be that Midjourney prompts are just suggestions or ideas, and those can’t be copyrighted. Does that mean that since Pollock just had the idea of splashing paint onto canvas, and the unpredictable physics of the paint cans and the air produced the actual work, that “Autumn Rhythm” can’t be copyrighted? Or are they going to hold that there is a legal significance to the fact that the detailed movements of his arm muscles were involved? That seems dicey.
For the Office to claim that the prompts and other input did contain at least a modicum of creativity (which seems undeniable) but that that input wasn’t strongly enough connected to the output, seems to be inventing a new legal test, which it’s not at all clear to me that the Office can do on its own hook, can it?
This memo may be specifically designed to be contested, so that the question can go to a court that can do that kind of thing.
The memo may have interesting consequences for Thaler, in particular the cases in which Thaler attempted to claim copyright under work-for-hire theory, with his software as the creator. The memo explicitly makes the comparison with human work-for-hire, saying that if someone had given the same instructions to a human artist that are contained in a Midjourney prompt, and the human artist had made an image, then the person giving the instructions would not have been the creator unless work-for-hire applies (the human carrying out the instructions would have been the creator-in-fact), and that therefore they aren’t in the Midjourney case either.
To be consistent with both the memo and Thaler, the theory seems like it has to be that Midjourney is the creator-in-fact, and therefore the human isn’t (and can’t get a direct copyright as the creator), but also that software can’t be hired in the work-for-hire sense and therefore the human can’t get the copyright that way either. Which seems odd! It seems to acknowledge that the software is the creator-in-fact, but then deny both making the software the creator-in-law (because not human) and making the user the creator-in-law via work-for-hire (because I’m-not-sure).
Some other countries are different and imho somewhat more sensible about this, as in the UK’s Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act, of which Section 178 explicitly talks about “computer-generated” works, meaning “that the work is generated by computer in circumstances such that there is no human author of the work”. That’s still imho a little sketchy (I continue to think that Kashtanova is in fact the human author of the images in Zarya), but at least it then provides that “In the case of a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work which is computer-generated, the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.”
There’s still some room for doubt there, as for instance whether it’s Kashtanova or the Midjourney people or some combination who relevantly undertook the arrangements, but at least we aren’t in the position of saying that the author is a being that is not legally allowed to either be a creator, or confer creatorship to a human via work-for-hire.
In the case of the many, many currently-registered copyrights on images made with AI tools (including mine), it seems that if the copyright office is notified, or notices, that fact, they are likely to cancel / withdraw the registration. The theory will be that the registration materials were incorrect when they named the creator as the author of the work, without in any way informing the Copyright Office that an AI tool was used. I could, for instance, send the Copyright Office a note saying “oh by the way I hear that you want to know when AI tools are used, and in my case Midjourney was”, and then they might cancel my registration on their (imho mistaken) theory that I’m not really the author.
Since I believe their theory is mistaken, I’m not currently planning to do that. :)
If they discover it on their own hook and send me a letter telling me they’re withdrawing the registration, I will do whatever easy thing one can do to contest that, but I’m not going to like hire a lawyer or anything; life’s too short.
I’m very curious to see what others do; I would expect that Midjourney itself (assuming it’s big enough to have lawyers) will have their lawyers working on a response to this memo.
My copyrights on the Klara trilogy and Ice Dreams (casually announced here) are secure, as to the text and the image selection and arrangement and all, just not to the images per se. Which is fine. And I haven’t registered those anyway. :)
I should go back and add a note to all of my existing copyright weblog entries, pointing at this one; or, more sustainably, pointing at the entire “copyright” tag on the weblog here. Then I won’t have to keep updating it.
I’m quite happy I decided not to worry too much about this whole thing, and just make pretty pictures (see pretty picture of concerned purple aliens above).
Updates: as this is a developing topic (as opposed to my usual topics which are Timeless Truths of the Universe), you may want to check the copyright tag on the weblog here for later updates, if this post is more than a week or month old.
This is just a sample of some random stuff from Midjourney and ChatGPT that I think is kind of fun, and also illustrates a bit of what they can and can’t do at the moment. ChatGPT, in particular, can produce prose that is amazing given that it’s coming from a computer program, but is clearly not going to put any good fiction authors out of business any time soon. It is also able to talk cogently about why it does some of what it does. (Or, to be somewhat less inaccurate, to produce text that plausibly describes what a human might have been thinking had they produced a prior piece of text.)
I used Midjourney to create this image:
and then had this conversation with ChatGPT; I’ll put my words in italics, ChatGPT’s in normal text, and some after-the-fact notes from me in bracketed italics.
Imagine a character in a graphic novel. He is a patriarch in a noir steampunk / cyberpunk city. He has silver hair and is clean-shaven. His eyes glow red from the electronic implants in his head. He wears an elegant leather jacket. Please make up a backstory for him, including his name, character, and current activities.
The character’s name is Marcus “Silver” Cross. He was once a wealthy and powerful businessman in the city, using his influence and advanced technology to control various criminal enterprises. However, after a bitter falling out with his former partners, Marcus was left with nothing but his cunning and his implants.
Now, he spends his days as a freelance mercenary, using his knowledge of the city and his implant-enhanced abilities to take on high-risk jobs for whoever can pay. Despite his rough exterior, Marcus has a code of honor and only takes jobs that align with his personal beliefs. He also has a soft spot for the downtrodden and will occasionally use his resources to help those in need.
Marcus’s current activities include tracking down a stolen piece of technology that could potentially give him the upper hand in reclaiming his former power and taking back control of the city’s underworld.
[Okay, quite plausible; so plausible in fact as to be cliché. I wonder if choosing “Cross” and thereby allowing the nickname “Silver Cross” was a coincidence; it never uses that below.]
Describe the basic plot of a story centered around him.
The story revolves around Marcus “Silver” Cross as he sets out on a mission to retrieve a stolen piece of technology that could change the balance of power in the city’s criminal underworld. Along the way, Marcus must navigate dangerous alliances and confront old enemies, as well as confront his own demons and question the morals behind his actions.
As the stakes get higher and the dangers increase, Marcus finds himself forming an unlikely partnership with a young hacker who is searching for the same technology for their own reasons. Together, they delve deeper into the city’s criminal underworld, facing numerous challenges and discovering secrets they never could have imagined.
As they get closer to their goal, Marcus must decide whether to use the technology for his own gain or to destroy it, realizing that the consequences of his choice will affect not only himself, but the entire city. The story ends with Marcus coming to terms with his past and the choices he has made, setting him on a new path towards redemption and a better future for himself and the city.
[Again, very cogent, very unsurprising. “Unlikely partnership with a young hacker,” zzzzz.]
Please write a possible first paragraph for this story, in a straightforward noir SF style
Marcus “Silver” Cross strode through the dimly lit alleyways of the city, the red glow of his electronic implants illuminating the darkness. He was a man with a mission, a mercenary for hire with a reputation for getting the job done. And tonight, his target was a stolen piece of technology that could change the balance of power in the criminal underworld, and Marcus was the only one who knew where to find it. But as he approached his destination, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was being watched, that someone or something was lurking in the shadows, waiting for him to make his move.
[More of the same, as well as wildly violating “show, don’t tell”. “Make his move” is completely inapt, as he’s not making any kind of “move” here.]
Very nice! Please continue.
Marcus’s instincts were sharp, honed from years of surviving in the cutthroat world of the city’s criminal underworld. He scanned the area, searching for any signs of danger, but all was quiet. He reached for the doorknob of the abandoned warehouse, taking a deep breath before entering. Inside, he found himself in a large room filled with rows of discarded machinery, and in the center stood a lone figure, obscured by shadows.
“You’re late, Cross,” the figure said, its voice low and menacing.
“I don’t respond well to threats,” Marcus replied, his hand hovering over his holster.
The figure stepped forward, revealing themselves to be a young hacker, known only by their street name, “The Ghost.” They were the one who had hired Marcus to retrieve the stolen technology.
“I’m not here to threaten you, Silver,” The Ghost said, holding up their hands. “I need your help.”
Marcus studied the hacker, intrigued by their tenacity and fearlessness. They were young, but they had already made a name for themselves in the city’s underground circles, and Marcus couldn’t help but admire their spirit.
“What’s in it for me?” he asked, intrigued by their proposal.
“The technology we’re after is worth a fortune,” The Ghost replied. “But more than that, it could change the entire city, for better or for worse.”
Marcus considered their words, realizing that this was his chance to take back what was rightfully his, to reclaim his former power and control over the city’s criminal underworld. He nodded, agreeing to work with The Ghost, setting out on a journey that would test his skills, his loyalties, and his very soul.
[This is grammatical and idiomatic, but terrible narratively. “You’re late” wasn’t a “threat”, “The Ghost” is an awful name, and if this hacker has already hired him to “retrieve the stolen technology”, this entire scene and dialog make no sense at all. I was intrigued by the pronouns, though!]
I see you are using they/them pronouns for the young hacker; why did you make that choice?
I used they/them pronouns for the young hacker because I wanted to create a character who could potentially identify as non-binary, and the use of gender-neutral pronouns is a way to acknowledge and respect this possibility. Additionally, using gender-neutral pronouns can help to avoid assumptions about the character’s gender identity, allowing the reader to focus on the character’s actions, motivations, and personality rather than making assumptions based on gender. This can also promote inclusivity and diversity in storytelling, and help to break down gender stereotypes and biases.
[A nice explanation! I wonder what actually caused it; not that we ever know that with these big opaque boxes that are the current LLMs.]
What might the title of this story be?
A possible title for this story could be “Redemption’s Path: A Marcus “Silver” Cross Tale”. This title reflects Marcus’s journey as he navigates dangerous alliances and confronts his past in order to reclaim his former power and take control of the city’s criminal underworld. The use of the word “Redemption” highlights Marcus’s internal struggle to find redemption and make amends for his past actions, while “Path” emphasizes his journey towards a better future. The addition of “A Marcus “Silver” Cross Tale” emphasizes the central role Marcus plays in the story and the larger narrative context.
[Transcript ends]
So that was kind of neat. The little story about the title was well put together, although it had never really said before that Marcus would be actively making amends, and taking control of the city’s criminal underworld doesn’t sound all that compatible with that. In general the AI has no feeling for consistency: is the decision, for instance, between using the macguffin for good or for evil, or between using it selfishly or destroying it? As noted, the opening scene makes no narrative sense, and one expects that it would only get worse if it were asked for more.
The prose is painfully obvious and cliché ridden everywhere. Possibly some different / better prompts might have helped a little with that, I’m not sure. The basic plot ideas are also stale as a very stale thing. And both of those are really a result of the basic design of these systems; they are explicitly architected to do the most obvious and predictable thing. Any knobs and dials and things bolted on to them, to make them say interesting or correct things, rather than obvious things, are necessarily afterthoughts. So it seems unlikely that just making the systems bigger and faster will help with those aspects. In fact it’s possible that I would have enjoyed the rawer GPT-3, or even GPT-2, more in that sense. Maybe I should try whatever NovelAI is running these days? But their consistency is likely to be even worse.
There may be niches on Amazon or whatever where people write incredibly predictable stories without any particular regard for consistency, in hackneyed prose, and those people may be in danger of being replaced by AI systems. But were they making any money, did they have any readers, anyway? I don’t know.
One way that people have talked about producing entire (small) books using LLMs is to first have it produce an outline, and then have it produce each section (with further cascading levels of outline embedded if necessary). I wonder if that could help significantly with the inconsistency problem. I’m almost tempted to try it, but it would mean reading more of this mind-numbing prose…
The story of Klara, written by me channeling the Collective Unconscious, illustrated by me using Midjourney, and narrated and set to music and videographed by the talented Karima Hoisan, is finally finished!
I originally thought it was finished at the end of the first forty-frame thing; and then when I did Part Two at about the same length, I thought it was finished; and now having struggled for months on Part Three I’m pretty sure it actually is done. :)
Having just watched Karima’s videos of all three parts in order (playlist here!), I’m glad various viewers convinced me not to stop at one or two parts. It’s pretty good!
And I say this with all modesty; I feel like this story came through me, more than like it is something that I did. The comments over in Karima’s weblog, and her narration, have suggested various meanings and facets to me that I hadn’t thought of before.
In terms of the experience of creating it, it’s been interesting to see the various phases of interaction with the AI tool. I started out Part One by creating various variations of the prompt “detailed surrealism” on the v3 engine on Midjourney, and then weaving the story around pretty much whatever came out.
It happens that in v3, that prompt pretty reliably produces scenes from a stylistically coherent universe, including the MJ Girl, who plays the part of Klara in the first two parts. In Part Two, I had a bit more of an idea of what I wanted to happen, in a general way, but continued using v3 and the same prompt. This required somewhat more work, because it would produce images that didn’t fit with the story I wanted, so I had to put those aside and make more. But the style was at least not much trouble.
Part Three was quite different. For plot reasons, being in basically a different reality, the style needed to be different. It was relatively easy to do that, by using the “test” and “testp” engines, either alone or by “remastering” images made under v3. But the resulting images, while different from those of the first two parts, weren’t nearly as consistent among themselves as those of parts one and two. So I had to play around a lot more with the workflows and the prompts, and produce quite a few more pictures, to get a reasonably consistent style.
The style of Part Three still shifts around quite a bit; the flavor of the city, the color of Klara’s hair, the cat’s fur, and many other things change somewhat from panel to panel, but I wanted a nice mixture of consistent and in flux; and that took work!
Then there was the Story issue. The beginning “recap” part of Part Three was relatively easy that way, summarizing the story of the first two parts from a different point of view. But then I quickly got stuck; I wanted to do something more satisfying and less random than I would get by letting the AI’s raw output drive the action. For whatever reason, it took me quite awhile to find the story thread that I liked, and then about as long to create (or obtain, if you prefer!) the images to go with it.
(The images still drove the narrative to some extent; for instance the firefly line, which I adore, was inspired by the image that goes with it, not vice-versa.)
But finally I finished! :) And Karima made the video in record time, and there it is! Woooo!
I keep feeling like I should make it into good PDFs, or something (even) more readable, and officially post links to that; maybe even have it printed somewhere onto atoms. On the other hand, without the narrative and music and video, it would hardly be the same… :)
I asked Midjourney for some simple proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. The results make me happy. :)
(On the text side: GPT-2 and even GPT-3 might have hallucinated something interesting. ChatGPT would just error out a few times and then give a boring literal description of one in a condescending tone. My ability to be interested in ChatGPT as an interaction partner is severely limited by how boring it is. But anyway, back to the pictures!)
Presented without comment (beyond the alt text):
I hope you find these at least as amusing, endearing, and/or thought-provoking as I do. :)
We made just 106 dumplings this year, plus another eight filled with Extra Sharp Cheddar Cheese (that was the little boy’s idea; they’re pretty good!). This is a smaller number than usual (drill back into prior years here). The small number was probably mostly because single units of ground meat from FreshDirect tend to weigh just a pound, whereas single units from the grocery in prior years were more like 1.25 to 1.4 pounds. (Although, come to think of it, just where did we get the ground meat last year? Not sure.) And also because grownups tend to put more meat in each dumpling, perhaps. But in any case, we are now all pleasantly full, and the little daughter and her BF are safely back in the urbanity.
What has occurred? I feel like things have occurred, to an extent. I am more on Mastodon now than on Twitter, and if you want to keep up with the images I’ve been making in Midjourney and so on, you’ll want my Pixelfed feed. I listed lots of various of these pointers back the other week (and wow having every chapter of the novel as a weblog post makes it hard to scroll through the weblog). When Elon “facepalm” Musk briefly prohibited linking from Twitter to Mastodon, I actually set up a LinkTree page with my links.
Someone must have said “they can still link to Mastodon via Linktree” in his hearing, because he then briefly prohibited linking to LinkTree. That caused me to set up my own Links page over on the neglected (and in fact apparently pretty much empty) theogeny.com; I should put back all the stuff that used to be there sometime!
Note how ossum that Links page is! When you move the cursor over it, the thing that the mouse is over that you will go to if you click (if any) changes color (although I drew the line at having it bouncily change size the way Linktree does). You can look at the page source, and see the lovely hand-coded CSS and HTML. :) It even validates! (w3c seems to have a change of mind about validation badges, which makes me a little sad, so there’s no little “valid HTML 5!” badge on the page that links to the verification of the claim, but hey.)
That reminded me of the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton that I make in hand-coded CSS and HTML and JavaScript the other year; it vanished for a long time, even from my personal backups of davidchess.com, and I’d almost given up on finding it until I thought of the Internet Archive‘s WaybackMachine, and discovered that it had snapshotted that page exactly once, in February of 2012.
So after a bit of fiddling around, I can once again present the One-Dimensional Cellular Automaton for your amusement. The page source there is also quite readable, I tell myself.
Note that many other things on davidchess.com are currently / still broken, although in the process of bringing that page back, I also brought the main page back, so you can see the extremely retro rest of the site (working and otherwise), including the entries in this (well, sort of “this”) weblog between 1999 and 2011.
Oh yeah, we had Christmas! That was nice. :) I got lots of chocolate, and the little (not little anymore) boy gave me a digital image of Spennix (my WoW main) dressed like the pioneer in the Satisfactory game, with a perfect “Spennixfactory” logo. And wife and daughter both got me books: “The Hotel Bosphorus” (a murder mystery set in Istanbul, my current Bucket List destination, and involving a bookshop, so what could be better?) from M, and “Klara and the Sun” (which I’ve been meaning to get, but never had) from the little daughter. (She thought that maybe I already had it and that’s why Klara is called “Klara” in the Klara stories, but it was as far as I know a complete coincidence.)
I’m working away at Part Three of Klara, after she leaves the clockwork world, but it’s slow going. I have an actual plot in mind that I want to illustrate, and I’m using a different graphical style which necessitates a different Midjourney workflow that I haven’t quite optimized yet. But it’ll get done! Probably! :)
We close with a Seasonal Image for the Solstice…
Here’s to the coming of the longer days! Or the cooler ones, to those on the flipside… :)
I now have like 190 images in the folder that Windows uses to pick desktop backgrounds from; building on the twenty-odd that I posted here the other day. They are fun! But I’m not going to post any more right now; right now, I’m going to post some images comparing the various Midjourney engines (which they have generously kept all of online). I’m going to use the prompt “Hemingway’s Paris in the rain”, because why not! We can do other prompts some other time.
For most of these (all but “test” and “testp” I think), it produced four images, and I chose one to make bigger. Otherwise (except as noted) these are all just one-shots on that prompt. I’m going to paste them in more or less full-size, and let WordPress do what it will. Click on an image might or might not bring up a larger version or something who knows.
Here is the quite historical v1:
Here, similarly, is v2:
I rather like both of these; they are impressionistic, which I like, and I suspect it’s mostly because that’s the best they can do in rendering things.
Here is “hd”, which may be the same thing as v1 or v2 I’m not sure; this particular image is more strongly monochrome and sort of vintage-looking photo-wise:
Now v3, which is pretty much when I started using Midjourney; it’s interesting how impressionistic this is, given that we know v3 can also do rather more realistic stuff (all of this, for instance, was v3):
Between v3 and v4, we had this engine, lyrically named “test” (I used the additional “creative” flag, because why wouldn’t one?); one is getting a bit more photographic here:
and here is the “testp” variant of “test”; the “p” is supposed to be for “photographic”; I used the “creative” flag here also. It’s not notably more photographic than “test” in this case; maybe it’s the rain:
Now brace yourself a bit :) because here is the first version of v4 (technically in terms of the current switches it’s “v 4” and “style 4a”):
Yeah, that’s quite a difference. We have colors, we have lanterns casting light, we have very definite chairs and awnings and things. But now, the current v4 (“style 4b” which is I think currently the v4 default):
Yeah, that’s gotten rather realistic, hasn’t it? It’s even trying to spell out the signs on shopfronts, even if it hasn’t really mastered language. But those cars are extremely car-like and detailed compared to anything earlier.
Can this currently-fanciest engine give us something a bit more like the atmosphere of the older ones, if we want that? Basically yes, if we ask for it. Here is the latest v4 again, with “impressionistic” added to the prompt:
I rather like that! And “monochrome” would make it monochrome, and so on.
It’s perhaps interesting that the more recent engines were less insistent that pictures of Paris include the Eiffel Tower. Possibly just the random number generator, given how tiny our sample is here, but possibly significant in some way.
So there we are, nine probably rather enormous pictures of Hemingway’s Paris in the rain, as conceived by various stages of development of the Midjourney AI, and with only very minimal human fiddling around (picking the prompt and the one to feature from each set of four, having the idea to compare the versions in the first place, and like that) by me.
Comments welcome as always, or just enjoy the bits. :)
But yes, in fact I’ve been using good ol’ Midjourney to make some wallpapers, and figured out how to get Windows to permute among them as desktop backgrounds on this brand-new Framework laptop I have (I should write a long boring geeky entry about my old Windows laptop breaking and my replacing it with this lovely new thing whose only disadvantage is that I’m still running Windows on it ewww), and I thought I would share them here as the first of the promised (or threatened) posts with tons of images made with Midjourney.
I think I will just do it as a big WordPress Gallery thing? Which means WordPress will I dunno display them in some random layout, but I hope you can still get the actual images at full size by clicking through and rightclick-saving? Or whatever?
Kept the ol’ 2,000 words per day pretty constant during NaNoWriMo, except for a couple of days off that I made up for on the next weekend, so I made the goal of 50,000, and not by coincidence the end of the story, right there on the 25th (which was, let’s see, yeah, yesterday!). A nice feeling.
I think I like this year’s rather a lot. The little Midjourney pictures at the start of each Fling (where “Flings” really turned out to be Chapters) was fun, but I think not ultimately transformative; not a big deal. A few plot elements, some important, (the libraries, the plants, the fast sharp ships) came from the images, but without the images something else would I expect have sprung to mind and perhaps carried the same basic ideas, about meaning, and communication, identity and the symbol-grounding problem.
As a reminder; the whole thing can be read in order by clicking on the cover page here, and then clicking the bold link at the bottom of each Fling. I may be going through and fixing a few errors between now and the end of the month (although the relative inconvenience of doing that in WordPress may limit how much I do).
In other news, I’ve been on Twitter less, and on Mastodon / Fediverse more, prompted by the gross antics of the billionaire narcissist, but continuing just because it’s a more interesting place, with (so far?) more interesting and less upsetting communication going on. (It could be argued that given the State of Things, one ought to be upset; but so far I think the argument is flawed.)
I’ve been making tons and tons of images on Midjourney still (getting up near 20,000, the system tells me!) and they are still constantly improving the engine(s), which is very cool. I’ve been posting some of them on PixelFed (roughly, PixelFed is to Instagram as Mastodon is to Twitter), and also still on Twitter (the same ones, mostly). I have enough pictures that I love to fill many, many weblog posts, and I’m sure such posts will appear.
Here’s just one image for now that’s a total favorite; it’s called “Accord”:
Is that amazing, or what? He said modestly.
In the legal domain, there is talk of a class-action suit against Microsoft / GitHub / OpenAI / Copilot, on something like the claim that training an AI on a piece of code requires the appropriate license from the owner of that code (or equivalent, as for public domain code or code you wrote yourself). The possibility of implications for AI art tools like Midjourney, and AI text generators like NovelAI, is clear, although there may also be significant differences. For instance, there seem to be various examples of exact plagiarism by Copilot, whereas as far as I’m aware no such thing exists for say Midjourney or NovelAI.
(There was at least one person persistently spamming Twitter and Reddit with a copy-pasted claim that GPT-3 plagiarizes, pointing at various things on the web that did not actually show, or generally even claim, that. I can’t find them today; perhaps OpenAI’s lawyers sent them a letter. Similarly I’ve been told by one person on Twitter (and at least one other who agreed with them) that for “[a]lmost all pieces I’ve seen thus far, I can point at and name the elements that came from individual artists, and often individual paintings or works”, but when I expressed interest and asked for a concrete example, they said roughly “I’ll get back to you tonight” and then went silent.)
It will be interesting to see what happens with this lawsuit. Somewhat sadly, I think that:
The most likely outcome is that they’ll just lose, because Microsoft is rich and individual Open Source contributors, even as a class, aren’t rich,
Second most likely, Microsoft will give some symbolic amount of money to something that will benefit some Open Source contributors a little and some lawyers a lot, and there will be no precedent-setting court decision,
Less likely, after some long wrangling process, something like the Private Copying Levy might be worked out, which is sort of like that last bullet, but more codified and involving more money, and possibly a precedent that there is a copyright violation at least potentially involved,
Even less likely, there would be some kind of opt-out process whereby a creator could indicate they didn’t want their stuff used to train AIs, and makers of AI engines would have to like re-generate their neural nets annually without the opted-art works,
And at the bottom, perhaps fairest in some sense but also least likely, a straightforward finding that AI Engine makers, at least ones that make money, really do need the right to copy and/or prepare derivative works of the things they train their engines on. So we’d get engines trained on just public domain works, things out of copyright, things posted under sufficiently permissive licenses, things they explicitly license, and so on. I would be fine with this, myself, but I wouldn’t bet on it happening.
We’ll see!
What else? That’s the main things I can think of. Oh, yeah, Thanksgiving was very nice; the four of us and the little daughter’s SO. We were (I was) especially lazy this year; beyond the HelloFresh pre-planned ingredients that we’ve used the last couple of years, this year we got the pre-planned pre-cooked just-needs-warming version from FreshDirect (ETOOMUCHFRESH). It wasn’t bad! And certainly easy. :) We also bought pre-made apple and pumpkin pies. I resist feeling guilty!!
Also my Windows laptop is broken (I’m not sure why or how; it behaves like a bad storage device, but both the HDD and the SSD seem perfectly readable when stuck into external USB things). Whatever’s wrong with it inside, it’s also vaguely falling apart, with cracked and broken keys, a non-functional direct Ethernet connection (on all connectors somehow), and some other stuff.
So I have an exciting new Framework laptop coming as an early Solstice present! (It’s supposedly in Alaska right now, on the way here in under a week or so.) Inspired, like so many other people, by Cory Doctorow’s glowing review. We’ll see if I am frustrated by the Intel graphics chipset. I’m pretty optimistic, as what I want to run isn’t like the latest AAA game; more like WoW and SecondLife and the GIMP and No Man’s Sky and Satisfactory. I might have to turn the resolution down some at worst I expect.
(In the meantime I’ve been using my phone and this tiny cheap Samsung Chromebook and just not using any of those programs; turns out my life doesn’t depend on any of them! The thing I’m most eager to do is get the GIMP going to work on Part 3 of Klara; in theory I could enable Linux on the Chromebook here and run the GIMP in that, but I rather doubt its CPU is up to it. Just typing this into the WordPress editor is lagging significantly just because I’m also watching YouTube and have a few dozen Chrome tabs open including like Discord and Mastodon and…)
Midjourney V4 (well, an “alpha” version thereof) is out! As if I didn’t already have enough to play with.
That house, floating above the sea with some balloons and things, is typical of the results of my old favorite “detailed surrealism” prompt. And this:
is from the prompt “neutral prompt”. We can tentatively conclude that it likes cute fantasy houses. :)
Here is a v4 (alpha) Yeni Cavan scene:
which is pretty cool.
In other news, I’m over 8500 words into NaNoWriMo 2022 as of yesterday (I haven’t written anything yet today). I’ve also make a cover page for the book, which links to the first Fling, and each Fling links to the next, so you can start at the cover, and go through the whole thing in the right order by just clicking obvious things. This may partially atone for posting it as a bunch of weblog entries in the first place. :)
I made the cover image in (obviously) Midjourney, and then fiddled a little and put on some titles (and my Government Name!) in the GIMP. I note that the skills of professional cover designers are subtle and profound; the titles on my cover are obviously in the wrong place, a professional designer would put them in places that were so obviously in the right place that one wouldn’t even notice, and I have no idea what makes the difference.
Okay! Now I am off to make the header image for Fling Seven, and start writing. I think it will be more of Alissa’s story.
A quickish update. I have said, and still believe, that things created using AI tools are just like anything else with respect to copyright. But recent events remind me that the Copyright Office is made up of people, and people are unpredictable, and US Copyright law is in many places a squashy mess made up of smaller squashy messes, so logic does not always apply.
Here is a currently-relevant set of data points:
I have registered the copyright on an image I made using MidJourney. I didn’t mention that I used MidJourney (or Chrome, or Windows) on the application form, because there was no place to put that; the form didn’t ask. The application for registration was granted routinely, without any complication.
I imagine there are hundreds / thousands of similar registrations from other people.
This person has registered the copyright on a work that they made using MidJourney (I think it was), and the work itself makes it clear that MidJourney was used. The application was afaik granted routinely, without any complication.
But now it appears that the copyright office has said “oh wait we didn’t notice that MidJourney thing, so we’re cancelling your registration”.
This person has applied apparently to register various images made with various workflows involving AI (dalle2 I think) to various extents, clearly stated, and rather than being just accepted or just rejected they’ve received emails from the copyright office asking them for details of what they did, and especially bizarrely suggesting that perhaps at least one of the works might have been “conceived” by the AI.
Which seems crazy, because the Copyright Office has generally had the opinion that software isn’t creative, and can’t (like) conceive things.
I suspect that things are just rather in disarray at the Copyright Office, and different examiners are doing different things, perhaps having gotten different memos on the subject, or just having their own different opinions about things. It will be interesting to see how the appeal mentioned above goes!
To me, it seems obvious that things created with AI tools should be prima facie registerable with the copyright office, just like photographs presumably are, and if someone wants to challenge based on some legal theory about either lack of creativity or derivative works or whatever, they can do that. The copyright office itself, I would think, would want to stay far away from any situation where they have to somehow evaluate themselves how many units of creativity are in each of the kazillions of applications they get daily.
On the other hand, the Copyright Office could simply issue some sort of guidance saying “We won’t register copyrights on works created with the significant use of an AI tool like dalle or MidJourney, so don’t bother asking” (and could even update the forms to have a question about it).
I think that would be dumb, and lead to court cases eventually that would either overturn that or at least cause a great deal of faffing about that they could have avoided.
But then people and government offices do dumb stuff all the time, so who knows! All is in flux…
And here is an image that I made using Midjourney. No matter what the Copyright Office thinks today. :)
Updates: Things have developed legally and otherwise since this was posted; I recommend the copyright tag on the weblog here for currency.
Another “fun corners of the AI’s network” post. These are all pretty much unfiltered and unretried and unmodified results with the prompt “figure three” with the current “test” or “testp” engine (v4 said to be coming soon!) on MidJourney. I have no comment except that I find them all wonderful. :)
(There are, typically, various women’s faces, and perhaps the word “figure” got us more sort-of-bodies than we would have gotten otherwise?)
Have you noticed, that sometimes one person is much more productive than another? :)
Due to my skilled collaborator on the first Klara video being one of those much more productive (than me) people, there is now a Part Two of Klara’s story, and that Part Two exists in the form of another amazing video on the You Tube!
Given my comparatively relaxed productivity :) I may or may not put the largish (or even an edited smallish) pdf of Part Two up somewhere. Perhaps arranged with the one for Part One, in some organized way!
This is the end of Klara’s story for now, but one never knows; she may appear again, for Further Adventures, on other days. :)
I am still creating hundreds and hundreds of images; over fourteen thousand all together, MidJourney tells me. And NightCafe says I’ve done another “4.5K+” there. A handful in dalle2. Lots and lots in NovelAI because it is so fast, but it also doesn’t retain them or give any kind of count, so I don’t know! But let’s say around twenty thousand altogether. Rather a lot!
November is approaching, and I have no real idea what I might do NaNoWriMo-wise. Will I use Klara’s story in some way? Will I use MidJourney images? NovelAI words? Or just type a lot? Stay tuned! :) And enjoy these lovely videos in the meantime…
Well, this is just too much fun. :) Very good Second Life friend and collaborator liked the little Klara piece so much that she voiced it and set it to the perfect music and made it into a rather wonderful YouTube! Definitely more accessible :) and more of an experience this way than the 327MB pdf file. Wooot!
Very excited to share with you all, this off-beat, pretty long (almost 10 minutes) surreal video collaboration with Dale Innis Those of you who read me regularly, know that Dale Innis is a scripter friend who has collaborated with me and also with Natascha & I for the last 10 years and lately has been dabbling in all sorts of AI Art, especially MidJourney, which is a veritable game-changer in this blossoming field. He showed me a pdf file of slides and a story-line, that he had made and I fell in love…fell obsessed, is a better word, to try to bring this to a way more people could see it. This is how the project was born. I found, what we both agree, is the perfect music Meditative Music and I made a voice-over and edited the slides into what you’ll see below. This is a very slow-…
So after I did “Ice Dreams” (50M pdf), as casually announced here, I did another graphic novel (to the extent that that phrase fits at all), or the first part of one, in a very different style and by a very different process.
For “Klara’s Story” (working title), I generated two-by-two grids of Midjourney images using the prompt “detailed surrealism” (a favorite of mine) and some variants thereof, and crafted some sort of story around the images (rather than using the AI to create images for a more-or-less known story).
ceoln 