I'm Ready For My Close-Up Now, Computer.

You can thank Tipa for this post. And Grimes. I already had half a mind (Quiet at the back!) to do something with the Grimes story when Tipa's post popped up on my blog roll. Go synchronicity!

The news that everyone's favorite/least favorite (Delete as applicable) posthuman (Or is that transhuman? I can never remember the difference.) has started an all-girl group (Grimes' description, not mine.) made up entirely of AIs and named it NPC seemed so on point for this blog as not to be ignorable, even though it turns out, when you drill down into the detail, the AIs are "not sentient" (Thanks for clearing that up, Grimes!) and the music is not, as yet, being created entirely by nonhumans. 

I think that might be the most overwritten paragraph in the history of Inventory Full but I feel confident you'll find it parses correctly. I love to parse! Go me!

NPC already have a song out. Well, Grimes and Chris Lake have a song they've released under the NPC brand. It's pretty spiffy, too, although the chant super-reminds me of something... 

 

The actual AIs aren't quite ready for their public yet for the extraordinary reason that "photos of the group weren’t ready yet because “we’re stuck on making their faces”"

Enter Artflow to the rescue. Artflow, as Tipa explains, is a website where "you type in a description of the portrait you want, and out comes a portrait of someone who never was."

The site itself is the most minimal thing you've ever seen. Absolutely no explanation of anything at all. Just the bare instruction "Describe your avatar and click Generate.", a box to type into and a button marked "Generate" to make the magic happen. 

There is more detail if you look for it. I recommend reading the whole thing. It answered a few questions I had, such as where the AI draws the images from and what the reproduction rights are. In sharp contrast to all the nonsense NFT talk we've been having, anything you generate using Artflow is "is licensed under the most accommodating Creative Commons license **CC BY** that allows both commercial and non-commercial use, including derivative work, as long as you attribute Artflow."

Perhaps more worryingly, considering my propensity to keep making versions of one celebrity in the guise of another, "This does not however cover the right to use someone's likeness for other than editorial use... You take full responsibility for both the provided content (including uploaded images, text and other media) as well as generated content that could be considered offensive, obscene, libellous or in any other way violating the law." So don't say you weren't warned.

I spent several hours typing stuff into Artflow last night. I'm warning you now that if you start playing with this thing you won't want to stop. 

The most fun part for me is watching my mind spontaneously concatenate fragments into phrases. I do
it all the time as I write but this thing just fires up all those synapses. I started off with the very obvious "My favorite person pretending to be my favorite character" but pretty quickly wandered off the predictable path into the deep forests of the subconscious.

Where "Lonely lighthouse keeper missing her cats" or "submarine commander having a moment of self-doubt as painted by one of the pre-raphaelites" came from is my therapist's guess. (I don't have a therapist, just for clarity, although I'd perfectly amenable to having one under appropriate circumstances.)

The next most fun part is waiting to see what the AI makes of the input. That's what turns the whole thing into a game. In fact, I can immediately see how this could be turned into an actual game, something I'm sure someone is doing right now, especially since the exceptionally generous license allows for commercial use.

The game would work like Pictionary, with people typing in their seed phrases and everyone trying to guess what they'd said, based on the result. Sometimes it would be very obvious. Some of mine came out looking almost exactly like I'd imagined. Others, however, were head-scratchingly odd.

"F. Scott Fitzgerald if he'd been an actor in My Own Private Idaho", for example, looks almost exactly I'd hoped it would. "Sylvia Plath as the handmaiden of the Goddess Selene", however, came out looking so incredibly unlike Sylvia Plath I had to go look at a whole bunch of actual photographs of her to see where it had gone wrong. 

And in the end I could see it. It's there in the jaw-line and the mouth and the shape of the skull. This thing isn't just making stuff up at random. It's smart.

Some of the results were just perfect. I really love this tryptych, which I did in quick succession. Either I or Artflow was really on a roll there.

The Marilyn is absolutely 100% spot on for the seed phrase. The Janis really does look like her, especially about the eyes, and the schoolmarm vibe is undeniable. The Kate Bush one looks nothing like her but it's just infectiously joyous. You can all but see the puppy. Makes me happy every time I look at it.

For every "Yes!" there was a "What?!" Sometimes I got the impression the AI simply had no idea what I was talking about.

Allowing for traditional gender stereotypes, I think Liam there looks more like a young boy than a young girl. As for Supergirl, I can see Melissa Benoist in there, somewhere, but if we were playing that game I mentioned, I'd be willing to bet my house on no-one getting Viet Cong. I certainly can't see it. As for Daria, well, it's perfectly clear Artflow has no clue who that is, although evidently it knows its Tennessee Williams.

The ones that don't work out are fun but it's the ones where it really works that send shivers down my spine. These next three are supernaturally accurate.

For some inexplicable reason I had The Addams Family on my brain last night, which inevitably brought the Munsters into play as well. "Uncle Fester's Sister"came out almost exactly as you'd expect, except she wasn't bald. Artflow doesn't seem to like baldness. I noticed other people had managed to get some naked scalps but only by specifying the word "bald" in the seed phrase. I thought it would be a given that anything based off Uncle Fester or Telly Savalas would come without hair but evidently not.

Towards the end I felt the results were starting to get a little... peculiar. Disturbing, even. These three make for a real rogues' gallery. I guess that's what you expect when you bring R. Crumb onboard and anything involving Zelda was always going to be risky. The evil martian turned out surprisingly cute, though.

On the topic of expectations, prepare for more of these portraits from paradise (or purgatory). I suspect Artflow may turn out to be my replacement for the Pitchfork 25 posts, something I can cobble together quickly or prepare in advance and stack up for future use. I know I'm saving every single picture and I can't see why I wouldn't want to share. I'm going to have to do something about the white backgrounds, though. Too jarring.

I do hope this takes off as a bit of a blogosphere trend, at least for a week or two. As Tipa said, I’d love to see what you come up with. Let's end with some of my favorites that I haven't already used.

Serge there, looking disturbingly like both himself and a deceased friend of mine. Millicent, so knowing. Dean in his prime, although I'm not quite sure about the Picasso. Almost a touch of the Lucian Freud about it, I'd say.

Hmm. Lucian Freud. Now there's an idea.