AI images, art and our own immortality.
“Wes Anderson film gone wrong”
That is the prompt I typed into Mid Journey, an AI text-to-image creation software, and it generated the above image.
In 49 seconds.
This seems to be the future of art. And the reason it is terrifying is not that engines can spit out images. It’s that engines can now spit out beautiful images. And that is the crux of the issue.
For centuries we have rested proud in the thought that us humans are, in some way, above our own mortality because we can understand and create beauty. And because of that, we can live forever.
But now, so can a computer.
Does this mean we are finished as a species? I think that question was answered a few decades ago, but now our last abstract vestige of ourselves has been successfully automated. Our art.
Or, this could mean that we, as a species, might be able to make better art, driven by the inspirations coughed out by our automatous sisters. But let’s wait and see.
In the mean time, below are more of the images generated by Mid journey. See if you can guess what my prompts might have been.