When I learned about DALL•E last year it seemed like magic – basically casting spells at a computer and getting images out – and now there’s Midjourney and Stable Diffusion (the latter which I can now run on my M1 laptop) and overnight there’s a whole ecology of secondary AI tools that have popped up. Since most of the interaction with these tools consists of stringing barely coherent word jumbles together – prompting – there’s a market for selling the coolest prompts. And prompters are starting to claim ownership over their particular flavour of letters, and are doing so with no sense of irony considering that the AI models are trained on art trawled off of artists who now see their style mimicked in the service of furry porn and tentacle landscapes.
But I’ve been having a blast! It’s so much fun just sitting and prompting and poking and playing around – it’s a fantastic toy and whoever markets a fast upscale + printing service targeting this is going ot make a mint.
The technology & scene is changing at a breakneck pace, and hanging out in the MidJourney Discord is great, as is the Unstable Diffusion Discord with it’s abundance of digital horror erotica monstrosities being prompted into existence.
So I’m writing this post just to mark a moment in time. There are so many clever things being written about the latest wave of AI that just keeping up feels like a full time job – but Jon Stokes primer below is a good start.
What if I told you that every configuration of bits that can possibly exist — every abstract concept or idea, every work of art, every piece of music, everything we can put into a digital file for display or playback on a computer or in a VR headset — is already out there on the number line and that the act of turning any given chunk of information into a readable file involves first locating that thing in the eternal, pre-existing space of numbers and then reversing enough local entropy to give that number a physical form?
Jon Stokes: AI Content Generation, Part 1: Machine Learning Basics
The span of what these models can create is breathtaking – there’s literally no visual expression that they haven’t encountered. As per Jons article, all the images are already out there. Which is equally true of all pencil drawings being encased in every pencil lead, each marble statue in each block, etc, but never have the potential forms been so accessible. Indeed: Expecto Patronum JarJar Wang!