AI Essay Collection - Part I: AI, Images, and Human Minds by Doc Nolan

 Using artificial intelligent agents like Mid Journey to create images is an adventure, but watching how people use MJ is sometimes fascinating, too.  My approach is to insert prompts about a topic (let’s say “opossums and anteaters, photorealistic, in a forest”) using the /imagine command and sit back, curious about what the AI will do.  Sometimes, it’s something unexpected.  Precisely for that reason, I like it.  I’m curious.  I want to play with the AI to see what it will do with a prompt or an image.  Often, I end up following things to ugly ends, so I double back and try to alter my prompts, curious to see where that fiddling may lead.  In short, it’s as if I were in the mountains, going down side trails to see where they lead, hoping they go somewhere super cool.  If they don’t, “nothing ventured, nothing gained.”  I call my approach exploratory and open-ended. 

Another approach I see is people imagining something and wrestling with prompts until the AI produces something similar to what they had in mind.  This method is more adversarial, and I liken it to someone trying to assemble an Ikea bookshelf with a collection of miscellaneous tools in a borrowed tool chest.  They wish they had a hammer, but there’s no hammer, so they use a wrench to pound pegs into holes.

A variation on this latter method is to use Mid Journey to produce a “salable”  or “commercial” image.  This process involves tightening the requirements and getting feedback from others to see if they like what the AI has produced.

People with these orientations can work side by side and even together.  The explorer can throw images to others (sometimes merely images they have rejected!).  If they look to prompts they’ve used, they can share them, much as any explorer can write a journal and send it around for others to read.  Those bent on building roads to predetermined points can use random ideas and turn the AI to their ends.  And yet others can make all that they learn into a dollar and cents business.

I am sure there are other ways to approach AI.  Some might want to collect prompts and (like any decent botanist) try to create “dictionaries” of prompts and sample images.  Perhaps a better analogy would be the mapmaker.

And I am sure there are other ways of approaching image-making with AI.  (Personalized porn comes to mind!)  And then some develop a “relationship” with something like Mid Journey, much as some become fans of Civilization VI or Minecraft or Dungeons and Dragons.

The real point is that the human side of the machine/man interface tells you a lot about the carbon-based intelligences interacting with the silicon-based ones.  A dance.  And whether a polka or a cumbia or a minuet, you observe and learn about the dancers.