Let’s start off with the “unspeakable horror” part so we can get it out of the way. We all need to be clear-eyed about something…..
Artists and Illustrators? You’re done!
Musicians? You’re done!
Writers, like myself? We’re WAY done!
That’s right, AI is here, and we’re all as good as out of jobs; its only a matter of time! But, before we take our place in the unemployment lines and wind up as Soylent Green, let’s have some fun with it! I recently sat down with my own AI and thought I’d see what it could crank out for images based on my blog, and what I got blew me away! And just think…this is only the beginning!
So first, I just asked for some images of muscle car track racing to see what that would look like. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but here’s what I got:
A Camaro, a Mustang, and a GTO! Not Bad! So then I said, OK, that’s good; now, make it look a little more like artwork…
Hmmmm…very nice! OK, so now, keeping in that style, let’s see images of a pit crew at that same race with the same rough-edged vintage aesthetic.
Not bad! Not perfect, though; notice the Mustang logo on the grille of the Camaro? That’s a classic AI mistake….at least, right now…until it learns more!
OK, now let’s do that again, only in the rain
Wow! That #29 car is interesting; you can see a Camaro roofline with a Challenger side profile and a Coronet 500 grille! So that’s not a real car, but rather an amalgam of muscle cars as the AI understands it, and yet it looks so good that I wish it was real! Perhaps its one of those Brazilian or Australian MoPars? 😀
Here again we can see an imperfection: nevermind that that GTO is about to ram headlong into an oil barrel, just look at that realistic 76 logo!
OK, now show me that pit crew chillaxin’ between races…
OK, so now my interest was piqued enough for a bigger ask! For my next step, I fed the AI the URL of one of my blogs posts – it happened to be this one – and asked it to generate a series of images for me based on that post: I asked for images of the cheering crowd, a pit row scene, a couple of action shots from the track, and the finish line. Here are the results….
Impressive! So now, I thought we’ed try to take it up another notch! So for my next trick, I asked for a sports car race at Drag City, only this time, instead of making the images look like artwork, let’s go for a more “photo realistic” style! And let’s do 5 of them: the crowd at the gates, the pit crew prepping cars, the start of the race, an action shot from the track, and the winner’s circle!
So yes, in some cases it’s almost perfect and in others it misfires, but for the end, here are some single images of various cars, and I bet you can tell me exactly what each of these is!
As for this very last one: well, this must be an Australian muscle car race, because you can tell what all these are – the Challenger, the ‘70 Shelby Mustang, the ‘Cuda – but little details are wrong, like that black ‘Cuda having a Firebird grille, and the Shelby has a kinda sorta AMX Javelin “posture” to it. It’s still an awesome image though…and the marque in the background bears the name of a Drag City event!
So that was from just a couple of hours of playing around! Lord only knows what I’ll get if I ever really get serious about this, but I doubt I will, because as cool as this is, it also scares the hell out of me! I just hope we’ll still be able to enjoy ourselves when we’re all submerged in pods of amniotic fluid being used as batteries!
Have fun racing, dear readers, before the machines replace us all!
