I asked an artist to make some pictures for me, and the results will surprise you.
At first I just wanted to see what the artist could do, so I tried to think of an elaborate prompt and came up with “a fantasy world knight shakes hands with his own shadow on top of a mountain.”
The artist made two pieces based on that prompt. Here’s the first one:
I was struck by the contrast of sharp and soft lines, the artist’s interpretation of “knight,” “mountain,” and “shadow,” and of course by the colors.
What is going on with the knight’s head, and who is that little figure beside the shadow?
Here is the second one:
The two seem to have switched roles. This time the figure in the foreground is clearly a knight wearing colorful armor and leaning on a sword in his left hand. He’s staring across a valley at a gigantic figure facing him on the opposing peak, but now the figure in the background seems to have four legs and looks ominous and nebulous because now he is the shadow, but he still has what appears to be a portal bound by columns of light for a head. Most interesting, to me, is that the two are no longer shaking hands. What happened?
I like Winslow Homer, because I’m a basic American, so the next prompt I tried was “two beautiful, twin women, one good, one evil, standing knee-deep in the surf at sunrise, in the style of Winslow Homer.”
What an image! It seems like when I asked for “two… twin women” the artist thought I meant two sets of twins. Also, I didn’t tell the artist to put the sunrise inside a breaking wave. I never would have thought to do that, and I could speculate on the symbolism of it, but I’ll just say I think it’s pretty cool. He also nailed the evocation of Winslow Homer while remaining in his own surreal, dreamy style.
I’ll show you these next few pieces with no comment. The artist usually gives me two works for each prompt but sometimes gets interrupted and only produces one.
As you may have guessed, the artist isn’t really a “he,” but an “it.” It’s an open-source, collaborative AI project called VQGAN+CLIP. There are many versions of it online, but I used the one I found in this cool listicle on Gizmodo.
Anyone can use it or even make a copy and edit the code. To try it out, click the link above, scroll down to “art section parameters,” type your prompt next to the word “text,” and press CTRL+F9. It will then start producing images based on what you’ve typed. It uses an iterative process, and you can tell it how many iterations to do. I used the default of 500, but if you set “max iterations” to -1, it will keep going ad infinitum.
The extravagant prompts I started with produced intriguing results, but when I thought to ask for representations of basic nomological phenomena, things got even more interesting. Observe:
Not much needs to be said about those except to observe the similarity between the face in the AI’s “redeemer of mankind” and the image on the Shroud of Turin:
Naturally I was impressed by this string of uncanny and compelling results, but the illusion of insight or wisdom was shattered when I tried the prompts “life” and “death.”
Life is a bag of chips? I think not, unless we’re talking home-made. Or maybe it’s saying our (human) lives consist of reclining on a soft carpet (#2) and eating chips while browsing the internet (#1)? Touché, machine.
It did a lot better with “death” though.
Finally, I asked for “a clean crisp corporate logo in red black and white for a media company called Mimesis,” and this is what it gave me:
and
One of those should do for now.
The only thing left is to take myself out of the process. What sort of art might machines make when left to their own devices, with no human prompting?
Enter randomtextgenerator.com, “a web application which provides true random text that you can use in your documents or web designs. How does it work? First [they] took many books available on project Gutenberg and stored their contents in a database. Then a computer algorithm takes the words [they] stored earlier and shuffles them into sentences and paragraphs.”
The site produces a whole page of text at the word “go,” but we can just use the first sentence, which, on my first run, was, “Unfeeling so rapturous discovery he exquisite.”
Nice. Here we go:
The second round of random text began with, “Too cultivated use solicitude frequently.” Who would gainsay that? Unfortunately, the program stopped working for me, so we’ll have to wait and see what VQGAN+CLIP thinks that sentence might look like.
It makes sense to stop here now and leave for another day the question of, “but what does it mean?” both because this is already too long and because I don’t know what to say other than, “this is digital mimesis.”
The other question is, “what’s the point? Why even bother to write for the public when there are so many other people out there doing it so much better?”
Maybe the answer is, “to make you aware of them.”
For example, check out my man David Mamet dropping another mammoth hammer in Unherd:
“I have the habit of sending beloved books on to friends. This is, I know, the delusion of an amity which nowhere extends to suggestions of literature. I know that my friends never read the books I suggest, as I never read the books they send.”
I can relate. I know it’s exceedingly rare for any of you to click on any of the links I so carefully curate for you, and all I can say is you’re missing out. Bigly.
Also, I downloaded the Substack app and searched for “mimesis,” and this blog was the third result. The second was a writer I’d never heard of named Kristin de Montfort, and her latest piece is quite good. I highly recommend it, although it’s not exactly an easy read.
I’ve been forgetting to say this, and I lost a few readers by not posting anything for three months, so:
Share this with at least one person, or the Easter Bunny will come visit you in the middle of the night and return all your baby teeth, but in a way that you won’t find pleasant.
And when that happens, I’ll write it up.
Until then, keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out, and don’t forget to be kind to the ones you love.
Love,
BPR