Thursday, February 16, 2023

There's a (zombie) elephant in the room (and it's walleyed and the trunk is fused with...something.)

 

I made the above with DALL-E. I told it to give me Jean Harlow under the moon with spanish moss and a dog. It gave me this.

Admittedly, I don't spend much time with AI at all. So I haven't found the right words to make it give me anything sane looking. But the thing is, a lot of people DO spend a great deal of time with it, they're making decks, and none of those are sane looking either. I won't be so mean as to publish anyones' images here. But suffice to say that I'm seeing misaligned eyes, clothes growing out of peoples' skin, fused and deformed body parts, motors and mechanical parts in nonsensical places, tons of destroyed mattress stuffing...well, you get the idea.

I was talking with someone about this, saying how the people and animals resembled zombies and road kill. And they said that was the darkness and monstrosity they felt from it. They called it Frankentarot.

I've used the term Frankendeck before, to refer to those decks people put together from scavenged Public Domain images. While some of them are nice, many are jarring - the art styles can be incompatible. 

But this takes it more than a few steps further. You can think of the AI as Dr. Frankenstein and Igor. They go forth collecting parts from graves and gallows, bring them back, and stitch something together for you. Interesting, but not what I want in a reading deck.


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