AI Adventures – What’s it all about ???

The past few days have been kind of rough in regards to getting my outdoor projects completed because of the rain. So when it rains and I can’t go out to play, I hit up YouTube to see what’s new, watch a movie, listen to new music, etc.. Well I was just about petered out when I clicked on this one video about making money with AI images. I watched the video and learned some stuff, so then I decided to see what it’s all about by visiting 3 different AI Image Creation Sites.

Now before I go any further I just want to remind everyone “You were warned about this kind of shit back in the 80’s”. Handing control over to a computer to do your work, what could go wrong ??? If you have no idea what I’m talking about go and watch the Terminator series of movies and learn about Skynet… what could go wrong…

So given that you were warned back then, and just now in case you weren’t even hatched yet, let’s dive into the world of AI image generation.

In the video the guy mentioned Open Art, you can kind of poke around and get an idea for how this works. You start by “prompting” the AI with a series of keywords, or a sentence and it then hit the “generate” button. From there, the computer goes through and tries to create an image based on what you told it that you wanted. The more descriptive it seems the better, however shorter and less descriptive keywords can be fun as well. I wasn’t all that keen on the setup of this one and after I ran out of free generations I got bored and I went to Google and looked for others. Here’s some of the images I was able to make at OpenArt:

Now at first glance the majority of these images look just fine, and they are, but as you go through and look at them a little more carefully you can start to notice oddities throughout some of them. I’m guessing this happened when the AI had an identity crisis or meltdown and didn’t know what to do. So before you go slapping your new AI generated images all over shirts, tumblers, and stickers… you might want to check them over and see if there’s anything wrong with them… which brings us to some of these oddities I created or well, the AI created for me:

I encourage ya’ll to go through and look at the images above, just click on them to open up a larger version. Some of those horses…. just wow. Some of them have really long necks, have some Rasta ones, grunge ones, some with two heads or three mouths… now this doesn’t make them bad, just really really odd to say the least.

Now the next one is called Gencraft http://www.gencraft.com and I didn’t get anywhere near the anomalies that I did with OpenArt. Worked much the same and is a credit based system where you get so many “free” credits, then you need to upgrade your account. The last one I mention in this article at least offers a chance to earn more free credits which is pretty cool. Anyhow, here are the images that were generated for me with the Gencraft AI:

Now if we look at these images you’ll notice that there are no oddities in them, or they’re well hidden. But this also shows off one of the other settings you can play with and that’s the “model” of which these sites have several available and above you can see there’s even an anime style which was kind of neat. You can also control how strictly the AI interprets your prompt and several other things I am still learning about and what they do.

So saving what I think is the best for last is called NightCafe http://creator.nightcafe.studio. I think I got the best images from this AI so take a look: (remember to click on the images to see the full size)

So all in all I have been having a bit of fun here and there playing with the AI Image Generators. I really haven’t explored other AI things like text or article writing yet and don’t really see much need for it because I can write just fine. What amazes me the most is that the AI can generate these images in about a minute or so and for me to make these images in any of the 3D rendering programs would take hours to setup and then render. So not only is it taking the creativity out of your hands, but it is also replacing programs at the same time… remember the first bit about you being warned back in the 80’s ??? Here it comes… just waiting on an AI named Skynet to show up and send Terminators to deliver my Amazon packages.

Updated 9/20/2023: I’ve curated a short list of some additional AI programs you might find useful and just tossed all the links down below.