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(AI imagery by astro /@ainextastro on the site formerly known as Twitter, via Midjourney and/or Stable Diffusion)

By ultronxart

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God of Outcasts

Digital painting, digital collage, AI elements

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(AI imagery by @jpainorn via DALL-E)

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Alfred Emile Stevens, A Lady with a Parasol Looking out to Sea | Under Water (AI)

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(AI imagery by YAN61/ @youare-number6 via Midjourney)

Floral Jupiter

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Midjourney - Jellyfish Arcade

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(Digital art by eightbitstrana via Stable Diffusion and Adobe Firefly + pre-generation sketching and post-generation editing)

By eightbitstrana

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(AI imagery by @fortunaestalta , program unspecified)

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(Digital art by Trent Troop / @therobotmonster / @deepdreamnights via Midjourney + post-generation editing)

"Night on the Town"

"We dated for a year and a half, the reception-"

"-was a mess, absolute travesty. We wanted Swedish meatballs."

"They're just like vorma. Something both sides of the family can enjoy equally. And we all also equally shared in the food poisoning."

"But that's normal wedding stuff, which is kinda the point. The dinosovian conception of marriage has more in common with ours than not."

"There are compromises, of course, but neither of us is very traditional, so its easy to accommodate most of our family's little demands. Like, I took her name, which made my traditionalist mom and aunt very happy."

"And made uncle Robert very annoyed, which I greatly enjoy."

"But to be fair, in a nod to her traditions, we chose to live in our own home rather than a multi-generational arrangement, as is thyrene custom."

"Sweetie, plenty of humans live in multi-generational homes."

"Can you not print that last bit? My mom reads your magazine."

-Dyo (34) & Melynie (28) Sledge, Newlyweds

Dyo and Melynie were made using multiple midjourney generations, photo-manipulation, and digital painting.

Normally, when I post something of this complexity, I don't give full details because its just a massive volume of information almost no one will care about. But I figure what the heck. Might as well show it off once.

MJ can do theropods pretty easily (assuming you're not picky, don't want feathers, and it doesn't need a tail), almost any other kind of dino is going to be a collage process. Ankylosaurs are a major blind spot.

So here's just some of the prompts I used to make bits and pieces of this composition.

photograph of a humanoid snapping turtle with a large, thick shell

an ankylosaurus anthro with a long, powerful, alligator tail, large, thick shell, green scales, white horns and spines, ankylosaurus tail, thagomizer :: long green reptile tail, over the ground, photography

a green humanoid ankylosaurus, photography, nighttime city background

photograph of a an attractive, heavyset woman with red hair wearing a sweater and jeans, standing on a city street, looking lightly up, friendly, happy, nighttime scene*

a green ankylosaurus tail, photography, black background :: alligator tail ending in a knob of bone

To get the image I wanted, it had to be built in chunks, assembled and then painted over and photobashed to blend the pieces.

Getting thyrene clothing to make sense requires some sci-fi hand waving. the smart-fabric cinches around the gap between the back armor plates and the main torso. The "hood" is a flap that buttons on one side and is open in the back. It's a cold weather outfit.

*Midjourney's dataset leans to extreme thinness, so 'chubby' or 'heavyset' will typically produce a normal looking thin-to average person, while "zaftig" or "plump" are required actual heavyset builds.

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(AI imagery by @therarestartand via Midjourney)

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Doing It Wrong On Purpose: Episode 1 - The Un-Ship

Today's experiment: What happens if I prompt for something, and then negative prompt all the main keywords, plus various synonyms and related words?

The answer: Some gloriously weird stuff.

For example, let's look at a negative cat:

Positive prompt: A cat on a windowsill during a storm

Negative prompt: Cat, feline, felidae, kitty, kitten, animal, pet, windowsill, window, glass, pane, house, storm, rain, water, lightning, thunder, clouds, torrent, downpour, snow, blizzard, wind, windy

Interesting! Let's get a little more fantasy with it and try for an anti-deer:

Positive prompt: A deer in a peaceful flowery meadow, crystals, midnight, fantasy, colorful

Negative prompt: Deer, cervidae, animal, elk, moose, stag, doe, fawn, reindeer, antelope, cervid, antlers, flowers, night, dark, trees, foliage, bloom, stars, night, tranquil, fantastic, vibrant, cool, magic, blue, moon, sky, crystal, stone, statue, topiary, floral, blossom

Between these two experiments, including a few dozen other generations that remain unposted, one thing I can say for sure is that for living subjects, it's a great way to get the kind of anatomical wonk that older models are (in)famous for - and it makes sense why, the model is trying to make something that looks like a certain subject...but once it starts to look too much like it, well, shit, we told it NOT to do that! Break something up! Given that I love that kind of wonk, I think I've found a useful tool for myself.

One more living subject, and let's get even more abstract with our direction here:

Positive prompt: mind horse

Negative prompt: horse, equine, colt, filly, mare, stallion, bronco, pony, mind, brain, thought, essence, psyche, intelligence, consciousness, imagination, dream, soul, visualization, intellect, wit, cognizance

Now let's try something that isn't alive. One thing I love AI for is surreal settings and landscapes - lets try one now!

Positive prompt: A magic palace garden made of crystal and gold

Negative prompt: Palace, magic, crystal, gold, fantasy, castle, estate, stronghold, temple, garden, flowers, plants, blossoms, bloom, blooms, trees, grass, stems, foliage, leaves, greenery, branches, bush, bushes, hedge, hedges, metal, luxury, stone, glass, brass, rose, polished, jewel, prism, courtyard

I then tried to see if, learning from the animal subjects, I could make it more likely to return one of my favorite "mistakes" - making it impossible to discern the point where a water area ends and a sky area begins. I wasn't immediately successful, but I came up with some results I found pleasing regardless-

Positive prompt: Secret hideout in a cave behind a waterfall in the foggy forest on a floating sky island in fluffy clouds

Negative prompt: hideout, camp, campsite, home, abode, house, dwelling, rest, shelter, waterfall, water, cave, grotto, forest, woods, woodland, trees, fountain, cascade, pond, stream, lake, river, brook, puddle, creek, pool, beach, ocean, sea, cloud, clouds, sky, cumulus, cirrus, nimbus, fog, storm, rain, sunshower, falls

It seems that with landscapes it's got a much clearer and more specific "idea" of what a [SUBJECT] without [SUBJECT] looks like; it's more inclined to invent very specific, very consistent unasked for related elements. With the animals, I was tweaking the weight on the positive prompt to avoid getting straightforwardly just what I had positive (and negative) prompted, but with landscapes, I just get... almost something else entirely.

So how about inanimate objects? Let's try a ship, perhaps?

Positive prompt: A huge sailing ship with brilliant prismatic crystal sails on a stormy, turbulent sea of sunset clouds

Negative prompt: ship, boat, sailboat, sailing ship, pirate ship, galleon, ketch, schooner, sloop, cutter, sail, sea, ocean, storm, wind, rain, water, waves, cloudy, clouds, fog, sunset, dusk, dawn, sunrise, twilight, evening

...okay, I'm in love with the un-ship. It truly does manage to consistently give me results that look like, yet entirely unlike, a ship. It is everything I love about AI as a medium. More than that, it is my friend.

At lower positive prompt weights, they only get even more beautifully chaotic.

I want to live on one of these (in an alternate universe where they're geometrically possible and structurally sound, that is).

Failing that, I will be featuring them a lot from now on.

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

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(AI imagery by @shadyfruittree , program unspecified)

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(AI imagery by @zmicierkavabata via Midjourney)

By zmicierkavabata

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Economic anxiety has a way of bringing out reactionary sentiment in anyone if they're not careful.

It is deeply, deeply frustrating to watch it play out in front of me in leftist spaces such that self-proclaimed leftists are using actual, literal fascist arguments about Real Art vs. Fake Art and Real Labor vs. Lazy Button-Pushing.

These things don't become any less bad when you SAY your enemy is "some rich techbro" while calling broke disabled hobbyists "evil soulless automatons".

The central logic doesn't become true when you SAY you're targeting an inhuman machine while you screech obscenities about a great replacement at its operator.

When you say one minute "there is no unskilled labor, only undervalued skills", it doesn't magically absolve you of saying "nooo, you were supposed to automate away the BAD and DEMEANING jobs with no financial safety net for the workers, not THIS one I consider RESPECTABLE" in the next breath; it only makes you a fucking hypocrite.

"Fair use for me but not for thee" is not a rational position to prevent plagiarism and forgery; it's just a means to codify an ingroup and an outgroup.

"Degenerate art" is always, ALWAYS reactionary and proto-fascist thing to believe in, even if you wrap it up in other fancy words because you know "degenerate" is a Bad Word. "There is Good Art that makes society better and Bad Art, if you can even CALL it Art at all, that will rot our brains and turn us all into mindless drones if it's allowed to survive" cannot be made into anything but a reactionary position! Period! End of!

"Lazy button-pushers" are EXACTLY what corporations want you to think ANY automation operator is, so they can take credit away from those employees and criminally underpay them. They said the same damned thing about digital artists back in the early days of Photoshop. They say the same thing about overworked VFX artists today. You are DIRECTLY helping them make it worse with this argument.

The same old fucking trick of making you uncertain of your financial future so you lash out at other victims of the system because you "can't take the risk" of coming together to fight the actual enemy? Is working a FUCKING treat on way too many people who pride themselves on Not Being Like That - and it's even worse because a lot of the time pointing this out will get nothing but denial because maintaining pride in a leftist, progressive, pro-labor, pro-human Identity is more important to way too many people than ACTUALLY identifying the root of reactionary sentiment and the strategies used to spread it.

It makes me genuinely feel like I've fallen into a Fox News convention, hearing all these blatantly reactionary arguments and actively self-defeating strategies to Protect Labor.

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(AI imagery by @chronbinary via Stable Diffusion)

you came to me in the mountains (pt. 4)

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The Continents ARE the

This is the only categorization system that you could scrap the data from, make all new observations, and then reproduce again. You get a couple of small continents, a couple of underwater ones... It's a "8 planets and 5 dwarf planets" situation and a bonanza for the trivia game industry in one!

"But what about Europe!" I hear you shout in a vague attempt at peer review.

Henceforth, all arbitrary sociopolitical regions (like "Europe") will be designated as Zones.

We don't use the word zone enough. Think how much hearing "You are now entering the European Zone" come over the intercom after a long plane journey would greatly enhance the experience of international travel.

Go ahead, say it out loud. "Zone."

Feels good.

Feels right.

Zone.

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Ararachnophilia

Created in NightCafe Studio using SDXL.