Monthly Archives: August 2022


More AI image generation

I have carried on experimenting with the wonderful Midjourney app on Discord. My previous post had some images and a degree of explanation, but as a reminder. This is one of the new generation of publicly available of AI based image generation from text. Just watching the flow of requests and the range of styles and images that appear constantly is fascinating. It generates 4 images for each text request which you can then curate and push for further generation of more similar to that one. It can also take a web image not generated by it as inspiration.

This however, made me chortle, then stop to ponder, then simply just say way. I said /Imagine Lego John Wick – that is all I asked

Midjourney predator wick hardy
Lego John Wick

Look at the variety of styles from the top right and bottom left as actual minifies with shadows to a stylised top left looking as if he is paid in lego pieces not gold, and bottom right an angular representation but a cool image.

Then of course that got me going onto the obvious /imagine Lego predator

Midjourney predator wick hardy
Lego Predator

This just looks great, lots of predator variations, which as has happened with the films is pretty much in the storyline to have multiple tribes. (BTW Watch Prey the latest Predator movie on Disney+/Hulu it is really good !

Once again Midjourney hit me with its range of styles it delves into. I moved off the lego thing for a while and asked to see Laurel and Hardy breakdancing

Midjourney predator wick hardy
Laurel and Hardy breakdancing

This is a second generation image from a set of already very good images. Laurel and Hardy are of course well known, but there are no breakdancing scenes to refer to. Also, it chose black and white, presumably because most of the source content was black and white. The quirky style of this compared to the photo realistic lego minifigs and the stacks of other images show how amazingly versatile this approach is. You should be able to get a glimpse of the madness on my public facing page in midjourney (if that works )so I can stop posting here all the time saying “look at this: 🙂 You may need to change the second in from the right navigation drop down to grids or all, it seems to default to the large upscaled individual images.

Bring on virtual world/metaverse generation.

AI image generation – bots FTW

Firstly, yes its been a while since I posted here, I could have done with an AI clone of me carrying on sharing interesting things. I was out mainly due to an annoying post-ailment “thing” (medical term) hitting my facial nerves which meant for months any screen time trying to read or write was visually and mentally uncomfortable. That was followed with a dose of Covid that knocked me out for a while but also seems to have had a potential positive impact on whatever else was going on. Anyway, I am back. Anything happened the past few months, I mean 1/2 a year?

I suddenly felt compelled to blog about some of the marvellous work going on with AI image generation of late with things such as Dall-e and Midjourney becoming available to more people. I have so far only used Midjourney, which is accessed through Discord. In the relevant channel you simply type the command /imagine followed by any descriptive text you fancy and it will generate four images based on that, with often surprising results. Any of those images can be selected as the root to generate more in that style, or you can upscale, get a big version, of one you favourite.

Handy hint- The mobile version of Discord really likes to scroll to new items, midjourney works by updating your post to the channel. As so many posts are being generated every few seconds you might think you can leave the app on your post to see the results but very quickly you will zoom up the screen. Constant scrolling back to try and catch your images being generated is a bit of a pain. However if you log into midjourney.com with Discord ID it will present you with your collection and lots of links to get back to do things with them. The Discord search doesn’t seem to work on userid etc so it took me a while to figure this out.

After a few attempts, and with one eye on the political situation and crisis faced in the UK I asked mid journey “an artist forced to stop painting in order to work in a bank” and got this wonderful set of images

epredator_an_artist_forced_to_stop_painting_in_order_to_work_in_bdef4924-d482-4aa2-9156-404abea5841a
an artist forced to stop painting in order to work in a bank

I also asked it to generate a protest by the people

epredator_a_crowd_of_down_trodden_people_protesting_and_rising__79a1561b-94a8-47ce-8f87-51d6610ce657
a crowd of down trodden people protesting and rising up against the billionaires and corrupt politicians

Rather than continue the doom and gloom it was time to go a bit more techie 🙂 I asked it to show me directing the metaverse from a control centre

epredator_epredator_directing_the_Metaverse_evolution_from_a_hi_631ac745-9d7d-439e-a509-0ec2facdba7b
epredator directing the Metaverse evolution from a hi-tech digital operations center

An obvious course of action was to explore my Reconfigure and Cont3xt novels and this is where I was very impressed by whatever is going on with this AI. I asked to see “a cyberpunk girl manipulating the physical world using an augmented reality digital twin” and it seems that Roisin (@Axelweight) is in there somewhere 🙂

epredator_a_cyberpunk_girl_manipulating_the_physical_world_usin_f751db5b-4d89-4217-ac97-831b2518431a
a cyberpunk girl manipulating the physical world using an augmented reality digital twin

This was worth exploring and picking couple of the images to then seed generating more similar to that which generated these two

epredator_a_cyberpunk_girl_manipulating_the_physical_world_usin_e9b4303b-e51d-4080-8380-0563ae9f1bdf
a cyberpunk girl manipulating the physical world using an augmented reality digital twin (generation 2 from bottom left of gen 1)

And this one

epredator_a_cyberpunk_girl_manipulating_the_physical_world_usin_023f17fc-694c-4b36-a752-243dc0e24ef6
a cyberpunk girl manipulating the physical world using an augmented reality digital twin (generation 2 from top right of gen 1)

These were good but the first version of the top right image in generation 1 was the one I did a more detail version of on its own. It could be the cover of the third book couldn’t it?

epredator_a_cyberpunk_girl_manipulating_the_physical_world_usin_9bac6e1c-1cf6-4914-bd1a-38a56a8e1f0f
Midjourney generated potential book cover for third in the reconfigure trilogy. Of course one fo these from ore geometric results are more in line with my current cover designs asking “A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her.”
epredator_A_world_of_Fractal_Iterations_Quantum_Computing_and_s_c1fd5bc8-5f97-447e-91d5-89dc97834977
A world of Fractal Iterations, Quantum Computing and strange side effects opened up. It appeared to offer a programming interface to everything around her.

In case this seems a all a bit too serious, I did ask a slightly weirder question of the AI and got this.

epredator_two_ducks_with_a_top_hat_on_carrying_a_salmon_28a2f00f-dd37-4306-8710-750e6ea7e0b0
two ducks with a top hat on carrying a salmon

For a happy image how about this /imagine a bright green planet full of life

epredator_a_bright_green_planet_full_of_life_9df6f240-8bb5-4252-a3ce-500fe649388f
a bright green planet full of life

But back to the surreal and unusual and predlet 1.0 and I share a joke we “invented” when she was quite young, we were passing the pub in Lock’s Heath having been to the supermarket, she looked at the pavement and saw a creature. She said “dad look there’s a worm coming out of the pub” to which I replied “and he is legless”, and here it is

epredator_a_worm_legless_outside_a_pub_e3838ee3-3522-432f-a8a8-9fa7e733fb8e
a worm legless outside a pub

As this kind of AI generation evolves from the static image to the moving one and then onto virtual world and the metaverse, what a wonderfully weird set of worlds we will be able to dream/nightmare up 🙂