Category Archives: my work

Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battle

Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battleThis one is just for fun.

Last month actor and writer Wil Wheaton who played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: the Next Generation, got a rare Dall-E invite, and used “Wesley Crusher riding a unicorn into battle” as his first prompt, “because OBVIOUSLY.”  You can see what he got here on his tumbler.

I decided to see if the Midjourney art machine was up to the same challenge.  After several tries with the Beta –test renderer that weren’t very good, I tried the good ol’ V3 engine and finally got this image.  It almost looks like a Star Trek uniform. It almost looks like Wesley Crusher.  …And he almost has legs.  It’s wonkey and creepy but we like that, ‘cuz that’s the way AI art should be.  A few years from now when AI art is perfectly realistic, artists will attempt to re-create this wonky style just like Instagram filters today try to make your digital pictures look like old fashioned faded film prints.  Because realism is nice but interesting is better…

Midjourney “thinks” and creates a portrait of a cyborg with an electronic brain

Watch as Midjourney “thinks” and creates a portrait of a cyborg with an electronic brain.

EricSusch_portrait_photo_of_a_cyborg_with_electronic_brain_and__8541faa7-7d06-4d58-831d-7a269f35beaf#Art I made with #Midjourney #AI

 

My Cyborg Friend

Today I downloaded Stable Diffusion which is an open text-to-image technology from Stability.ai that can render images on your own computer.  You need a heavy duty graphics card but it’s free to use.  The technology is open and many other start-ups are incorporating it into their systems including Midjourney which I have been very impressed with.

It’s early days and some of the installation methods are technically complicated (“step one: install Python programing language…” etc.) but I found a user interface project – Stable Diffusion UI that has a “1 click” installer for Windows.  It was a little more than one click, but I managed and now I’m rendering away testing it out.

portrait_photo_of_a_cyborg_with_electronic_brain_a_a8795619My initial impression is that it’s not as good as Midjourney, not as artistic or flexible.  The resolution is lower, 1024 x 1024 is the largest available in the drop down menu, at least in the GUI that I installed.  I’ve also discovered that it has a tendency to create double headed characters if you use any resolution over 512 x 512.  Apparently the AI was trained at that resolution and if you try something larger it tries to fill the space by duplicating things.  Like I said, it’s early days.

I’m still very impressed though.  I’ve only tried copying and pasting some of my midjourney prompts which were of course optimized for a different system.  I have yet to spend time figuring out all the controls and I’m still getting some interesting images.  They render fast, within a minute or two on my system which has nVidia Titan RTX graphics cards.

More to come…