Good evening, Kibitzers!
Last week, one of the random videos I posted was a John Oliver segment in which he took a look at AI-created art (in this case, of himself). I prodded the AI at the craiyon.com site to produce an example of such art, illustrating the first line of The Owl and the Pussycat. The result was duly odd, and there was a little discussion about it in the thread.
So this week, I set out to do more with that idea, and I ended up with a two-part diary, of which this is part 1. In part 2, we’ll see what happens when the AI attempts to illustrate the phrase “Kitchen Table Kibitzing”. This is one of those deals where I got a lot further into the weeds than I had intended, and it ate my available holiday-weekend time. But no worries! We have plenty of stuff to look at now, while the other half is still unfinished.
I’ll start with a teaser for next week, though. This image at right is one of the ones it gave me in response to the prompt, “Kitchen Table Kibitzing painted by van Gogh”. I picked it out because it best matches, in color and style, my weekly little diary-opener van Gogh above the fold. You can see that craiyon knows a lot about van Gogh’s style and color palette, but it does not know, for example, how many legs pieces of furniture would be likely to have. I’m kicking to next week reflection about why that would be.
What I have this week is what I found when I went looking for next week’s explainer videos: a bunch of YouTubers who have taken to illustrating popular song lyrics with AI-generated art. Most of them seem to use Midjourney, which was publicly available before craiyon was. Midjourney requires an account, that may or may not be available at any given time due to volume of requests.
Most of these videos seem to share a look, a sort of fantasy/scifi/metal tone, much of the time. It’s unclear to me how much of that is inherent in Midjourney — I would guess not much, but that’s just a guess. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s just that people who feel like doing this come at it from a similar mindset.
All the makers state that the prompts given the AI are the song lyrics, but they can’t be just the song lyrics, frame by frame, or the visual style wouldn’t be so consistent, even in frames that don’t have any lyrics. Some kind of additional prompting is being given, even if we understand the AI to prefer the particular style we see.
I’ll give you an example. This video, Don’t Fear the Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, is from Daara, who specifically credits Midjourney for their images. Take a look at the images that appear at the beginning of each verse, when the guitar vamp picks up percussion. You might not parse the one at the beginning, but for the next two verses, the AI helpfully supplies puns, I’m sure not intentionally. For good measure, it decorates the third one with some squiggles it thinks are related: “COWBE”. There is no way the machine knows, on its own, from the lyrics alone, that “cowbell” has anything to do with this song. [5:10]
Okay, I’ll shut up now and let you watch, or not. TheloSpike brings us Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. [6:05]
From aidontknow: David Bowie’s Space Oddity. [4:51]
From Daara again: The Eagles’ Hotel California. (Whatever Daara is doing seems to particularly encourage the AI to add its mutant lettering to the images.) [6:25]
From slow rfa: Note that this is NOT Metallica’s Enter Sandman — you can see that song here, at Daara’s channel. No, this is the sprightly 1954 Mr. Sandman, by my Sweet Adeline sisters, The Chordettes. This song struggles against the preferred, rather bombastic visual style, occasionally to hilarious effect (see: “Make him the cutest that I’ve ever seen”). [2:20]
In Jetboi’s contribution, Frank Sinatra’s Fly Me to the Moon, we can see that the maker did not give the AI the same impression of foreboding that Mr. Sandman apparently was assigned. [2:29]
Sawfish TTV: We might expect the more typical style we’ve been seeing all along for Pink Floyd’s Time, not a cheerful song. This maker seems to have taken a different approach overall, though, and kept the album cover art front and center when prompting images. [6:56]
SolarProphet: ELO’s Mr. Blue Sky is also visually cheerier, but how quickly we revert to type when Mr. Night shows up! [3:44]
Kujo: King Crimson’s The Court of the Crimson King opens with the actual album cover (someone on the internet posted an AI-generated copy. It was… not a faithful reproduction), but quickly moves on into AI Lord-of-the-Rings-book-cover territory. [2:09]
From LoFi Farquaad: Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence. [3:09]
From Daara: Always the finale, Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven. [8:05]