Playing with AI (1 of 3)

For those of you who read my latest Superman story, I made all the images with AI. I didn't want to pay for anything, so I used the free Bing AI image generator. It was a way to do something different and play with a new toy. I had aspirations to build my real artistic skills, but time has not been on my side. The Superman story went long and had all 'new' characters. That meant more time that I didn't have time for any elaborate image making. That's where Bing came in.

You might have strong feelings on using AI. I do when it's used to fake things, but in this case, I was fine with it. I'm not replacing a human creator. I'm not trying to deceive anyone. I'm not passing off the images as something they're not. I openly stated in the story that all the images were AI-generated. So, I didn't (and don't) see any harm in trying it out.

I generated a ton of images, so I decided to share some of the better ones over the next few days in three posts: (1) alternate story images, (2) wrestling images, and (3) superhero images.

It was interesting trying to navigate how the whole thing works. It's theoretically simple ... type in a description what you want and BAM! there it is. That wasn't my experience. With a paid system, it might have been easier, but I'm not interested enough to pay to do it. It was challenging to work around censorship, inconsistent interpretations of my requests, and a general lack of control.

I never got exactly what I wanted. For one thing, getting consistency between images in facial features, hairstyles, costumes, skin color, body types, etc. was impossible for me to figure out. So, Superman, Luke, and Chris do not look the same throughout the story. Interestingly, any prompt I made for Zatanna that was also photorealistic led to a warning that the images were violations of their censorship. I tried 'female magician' and got closer.

Here are a few of the attempts ...

Getting Superman without a beard or stubble was shockingly hard. Even with adding instructions like "no beard", "beardless", "clean shaven", or "no facial hair" often led to a Superman with a beard.

Here's the best of what came from trying variations on cues like ... Superman in his classic costume, kissing the toe of a black leather boot, in a modern living room, photorealistic. Anything that involved a man wearing the boot was censored, but my thought was I could fix that afterwards myself.

I used this for the story masthead.

No, I wanted him kissing the boot and no beard!

That's not the toe.

Superman opening his jacket was easy ... except for that darn beard!

So close!

Comic book style allowed for more play. Nothing like this was possible photo-realistically

Don't ask me what the leash is attached to.

Somehow it being a drawing makes it okay?

Chris' villainous persona was also challenging, but I thought the domino mask result was funny. Asking for a swimmer or gymnast ended up being the right instruction for a leaner muscleman in skimpy clothes. I used a swimmer image for Chris' first pic which appeared in Part 1.

Nice, but more muscular than I wanted.

I actually like it, even though that's
not at all what a domino mask is

This is the closest to my original idea for Chris.

And lastly, Luke/Zaytanic was very hard to get right. Lots of different options, none of them exactly what I wanted. He wasn't intended to be as classically handsome or muscular as in the first image I used in Chapter 1, but I was tired of trying to figure it out. The whole point was to save time.

"Magic wand" was a trigger phrase, for sure. Censored nearly every time. These images came closest to being used and I liked them.

I loved this, but would have had to
change him from blond to dark-haired.

The swimmer prompt worked, but changing
the background seemed daunting.

This was perfect for Zaytanic, except I couldn't
get anybody like him for the Luke image.

I can't complain. I didn't spend a lot of time on this, quickly entering instructions over a period of days. It's possible that if I'd kept trying, it would have worked out better. And it's free, so what did I expect?

Hope you liked seeing these, especially since there's more coming on Sunday!

Alex