An Artificially Intelligent Christmas

This past year there has been a surge of news and buzz around artificial intelligence tools especially after the recent release of such tools as DALL*E 2 and ChatGPT. Many people are worried about the loss of jobs for artists and other careers due to these tools and the reality is that certain jobs will disappear or change due to this technology, but that is not all bad. There are many jobs that for either efficiency, safety, or repetitiveness sake should be done by a machine.

A lot of people see these technologies as ways for corporations to replace employees and keep profits. That may happen in certain circumstances, but what I see more is that these technologies are opening creativity and high production quality up to more people. Through 3D printing, regular people with some architecture software practice can make their own creations that usually would require thousands of dollars to set up a factory workflow in China. They can repair a busted piece on a legacy appliance from a free mockup on the internet or create a prototype to test rapidly before investing in a final design for injection molding. Likewise I think a lot of these are tools that will end up being used more by artists to enhance their own work or to replace what I would call commodity art, things like illustrations for magazine or newspaper articles. Although these are artistic endeavors, that is not the prime focus of that business and is often seen as an expendable expense.

To give myself a project to start working with and understanding this new tech, I decided to use the A.I. Generation tool MidJourney to create a piece of art for this year's Christmas card (pictured) above. The process was surprising, enlightening and fun. For those interested in the tech, I wanted to give you a short explanation of my process of getting to the final card.

Where I am, in the Czech Republic, a major tradition is the eating of a carp fish for Christmas dinner. I first started by trying to get a result that would reflect my wife and I fishing for a carp. I plugged in several prompts with this theme and ended up with several iterations using different styles of art and framings. I have added them below.

I didn't like how that was turning out. I discovered by reading the forums that the generators are not great at creating multiple 'hero' humans in the same picture. I decided to switch to just one and opted to try for a European peasant girl next to an icy lake.

I liked the results I was getting with this much more. The engine did not seem to be creating the style of Alphons Mucha as deftly as I wanted. Put I started pursuing this more and refining my prompts.

You have the option of choosing one of the four options the engine gives you if you like the general idea, but want to try to refine, create more detail etc. I did that with several of these panels.

Some of these were more promising, but not good enough for a card. At this point, I discovered how to upload a reference picture with the prompt to put myself and my wife into the art. For me the results were less than ideal and if actually used on my Christmas card for the year, would probably resulted in my mariticide.

I see a huge potential for this feature in the future but didn't have time to mess with uploading better reference photos or refining the prompts, so I went back to the peasant girl idea. And then I got my first genuinely impressive result.

I tried to refine some of these concepts further. Some results were as follows.

As you can see, the faces were of much greater fidelity and definitely started looking more like fine art pieces, however, the little details on each iteration kept disqualifying it for the intended purpose. As you can see in many iterations the hands ended up completely mangled or looked like sausagy man hands rather than hands that would fit the subject. This is a known issue with this particular engine at this stage in development. I kept refining the process but didn't feel I was getting what I wanted.

I decided to return to attempting to get some more with the boy and girl theme again and see if I could get more luck.

Some of these had promise and I did refine several of the options further but finally decided to go in a very different direction. As I contemplated where Europe is at this time, with the war in Ukraine continuing to rage, energy costs skyrocketing, a hard winter setting in, and the general malaise of the West culturally, the image of a beggar in a snowy scene next to a cathedral came to mind. I plugged it in.

I loved the result and decided to refine the top right version further.

Structurally, the version with the lamp (upper left quadrant), made the most sense and I refined that to come up with the final art I used on the card.

As you can see, this is a powerful new tool that has a lot of potential, but is not perfect and can have very unpredictable and even downright scary results. They are tools that need to be learned and wrestled with a lot to get specific results. I particularly see these as a means to do rapid iteration in the brain storming stage of creating an art piece or for iterations to get consensus on the feel of a requested work, if there are many decision makers in the process. One thing to consider, is the issue of copyright. Although these tools generally give the person entering the prompt permission to print and use the generated art, there is a legal and ethical question of attribution of rights to the artists the stylization of the art is done in. The A.I. engines do enable you to prompt using a specific artist's style and the engine is using pulled images to do that. In fact there are instances where the generated art has had mangled remnants of the signatures from the art it referenced for its iteration.

So there are definitely ethical and legal questions to wrestle with when it comes to this tech, but I think the benefits and possibilities this enables make it something that is well worth digging into and learning in the near future.

And as a final testament to the whimsy that can be created using A.I. art, here is Santa Claus fighting a giant carp. Merry Christmas.