Posts tagged ‘surrealism’

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2023/03/27

Odd little spots in Midjourney latent space

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:

A two-by-two grid of images, each of which prominently features a blonde woman who is not young, and at upper-left not thin, all wearing rather tight glittery knee-length dresses, standing in rather awkward poses, with other people in perhaps evening clothes in the background.

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:

A two-by-two grid of images, all in the same basic style and colorway, a sort of soft realistic style in muted purple, brown, and green. Three of the four images show a group of two or four Black children in loose vaguely futuristic outfits. The fourth shows a streamlined and rather futuristic looking automobile sitting on a roadway.

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:

A two-by-two grid of images, all in the same basic style and colorway, a sort of soft realistic style in muted purple, brown, and green that show a group of one to four Black children in loose vaguely futuristic outfits.

which, whoa, definitely very similar. One more time for good luck?

A two-by-two grid of images, all in the same basic style and colorway, a sort of soft realistic style in muted purple, brown, and green that show a group of two to four Black children in loose vaguely futuristic outfits.

I tried adding “–chaos 70”, which does something or other, and got this:

A two-by-two grid of images, in the same style and colorway as the prior ones, but a bit more variety: upper left shows one of the black children standing, and also a close-up of her face beside her. Upper right has two children in the same clothes, but with paler skin and hair. Lower left is one of the typical children, but with somewhat pointed ears and more elaborately wavy hair. And lower right is a child like most of the others, but seen just as a single face in close-up.

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:

A two-by-two grid of images of whimsical curvy vehicles in a sort of red and purple and blue fantasy-art aesthetic, with balloons. All but the lower right have a few letters at the bottom, as "PPRIIN" or "BD BIIIN". All but the upper right are on water; the upper right is among blobby clouds, and has a sort of helicopter thing going on.
A two-by-two grid of images in a sort of whimsical red and purple and blue fantasy-art aesthetic. All but the lower-left show a cute curvy vehicle on water. The lower-left shows a parrot-like bird in the same colors and aesthetic, sitting in a tree.

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?

A two-by-two grid of images in a sort of whimsical red and purple and blue fantasy-art aesthetic. All but the lower-right show a cute curvy vehicle hovering over water or sitting on wheels on land. The lower-right shows a whale or fish or vehicle shaped like one, in the same aesthetic, with an umbrella or something atop, hovering (swimming?) over land.

OMG so delightful. I love all of these! Next, I tried “tem wo sec” and…

A two-by-two grid of photographs of strange people or creatures. All but the upper left also contain a red sportscar (the car at lower right seems to have a police light bar on top also). The creatures are, clockwise from upper left, a person who appears to be entirely bald but with a huge greenish mustache and beard and pointy ears, a large bird wearing sunglasses, a humanoid alien wearing sunglasses and naked but for a tiny thong, and a yak-like creature in a large green hat.
A two-by-two grid of photographs of strange people or creatures. All four also contain a red sportscar. The creatures are, clockwise from upper left, not actually a creature but some juicy looking green leaves (the car in this one also has green headlights like eyes), a squat alien thing with big wide ears and many fingers, a green humanoid with pointy ears and sunglasses and a bright red shirt and belt, and a sort of leafy creature with a big open mouth, claws, and no visible eyes.

I mean… what?!

Then, “lus dab ba” with –chaos 60:

A two-by-two grid of images, all showing an oddly-proportioned skinny person in too-large dark shorts and a red jacket and sunglasses, arms wide, hands making V signs, looking exaggeratedly cool and/or silly.

“mai rem den” with –chaos 70:

A two-by-two grid of images, each showing two Asian-looking people in a more or less military or uniformed aesthetic. All but the upper right show an adult holding a child, where one or both are wearing rather outrageous sunglasses in upper right, instead of a child there is a young-looking and androgynous solider standing beside the uniformed adult (neither wear sunglasses in that one).
A two-by-two grid of images, all photograph style, of one or two Asian-looking people variously in uniforms, large hats, elaborate hair, and/or crazy sunglasses.

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.

And I kinda love it!

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2022/08/28

Sunday in August

Brilliant title, eh? :) Various things have occurred! I will mention some of them.

There is now a full draft of my graphic novel(ette); it’s 40 pages, and about 50MB, so don’t expect your phone to pop it up very quickly. And also don’t expect it to be that good :) as I’ve never really written in this medium before, and it’s tough. In the most recent draft I removed considerable exposition which felt out of place, replacing it with images and short statements. Now I’m afraid the result is basically incomprehensible :) at least to anyone not already familiar with the SF tropes I’m touching on.

It was really fun to do, though! As I’ve mentioned, all of the art was done using MidJourney, and the compositing and most of the text was done in the GIMP. I got a few nice pieces of display text from cooltext.com; if I’d thought about it a little harder, I would have used something more interesting than Sans-Serif Bold (and sometimes Italic) from the GIMP font collection. (There’s a little Verdana, just on the copyright page at the end I think.)

This was the most fun when I was putting together the images that I’d already created that inspired the story in the first place. It was more frustrating when I needed a particular image and was trying to create it in MidJourney; it is sometimes a challenge to generate a specific thing! The water droplet at the very end, for instance, came after many, many attempts to make a crystal / water sphere that wasn’t sitting on a surface of some kind.

Other things! In order to get even more meta than this, we entered “Here is a short description of an image that has some interesting visual elements:” into NovelAI. It responded:

A man wearing a white t-shirt and blue jeans sits in his chair, staring at the television. His eyes are closed as he watches a show about two women discussing the weather. The screen reads ‘NBC News’ with a picture of a woman.

and I typed that into MidJourney, and got this:

Four rather fuzzy pictures containing a person and some TV screens

So that’s in some sense entirely AI-generated, using a human-designed procedure. It’s also really boring!

Let’s try again; this time NovelAI says:

A woman in a white dress, standing on a rocky beach. The ocean is behind her and the setting sun makes for a bright glare to one side of her face as she looks out into the water.

and MidJourney responds with (after a considerable delay because I am in relax mode, which is basically “nice -n 19”:

Four nice slightly impressionistic images of a woman standing on rocks by the water with the sun low.

which is quite nice (although again not exactly what the prompt says).

So there you are: the first two (or eight) images produced by a particular meta-algorithm using Modern AI Technology! :)

Other things are to a great extent prevented from occurring by the fact that it is Very Humid outside, and there are Pandemics and so on still. I went out to get bagels this morning, and I was like “yow, what is this very large humid windy room here?”. There’s a chance I’ll get into Manhattan next week; that will be quite a shock!

I have not been playing Video Games to speak of, because all of these AI stuff has been more interesting. There is all sorts of stuff to say about legal issues (Yes, content generated using an AI can be copyrighted by the human creator!) and societal issues (impact of AI on artists and art perhaps similar to impacts of photography on same?) and all like that there. But it is more fun to make cool pictures!

So in closing here is the one I used on the copyright page of the Graphic Novel(ette). Be well!

A surreal image of maybe a sheep standing in shallow water looking at maybe like a blimp made of sticks or something.

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