Greetings from Carcosa

I was browsing Tumblr the other night and came across someone’s post that quoted “Cassilda’s Song” from The King in Yellow, and for some reason I wondered what might result if I ran it through an AI art generator. Here’s one of the results:

This is the first thing that mage.space threw at me, and I find something weirdly evocative about it. I’ve played about with mage.space a fair bit and I’ve occasionally got… interesting results, but rarely good ones. This might be the best I’ve got so far. I mean, maybe if I weren’t cheap and actually paid a bit for one of these AI things, I might get more “realistic” results (like the famous Pope in a Balenciaga jacket picture)… but, like I say, I’m cheap. There’s some things I’m happy to pay for but this AI nonsense isn’t one of those things.

And even this still looks like AI, doesn’t it? I see a lot of this shit on Instagram, it infests some of the hashtags I follow on that, and even the OK stuff is still… obviously AI (even the Pope picture does once you know that it is). It’s not the same as digital art that’s actually had a human hand in it; even if said human hand was just moving a mouse to drag pixels across a screen rather than drawing on a tablet, it’s still an actual person making the ultimate decisions… whereas pretty much all the AI-created stuff has a kind of sameness to it. It’s kind of characterless and dull. And I think that image I posted above wound up being good in spite of itself (the other images I got from that prompt were much less interesting)…