Another quick set of Early Clues inspired 80s style retro comics. (Archived). [Check out the Employee Handbook if you’re confused – guaranteed to “clear everything up!”]
Highlights below, larger set at links.
Classic.
Board meeting? More like BORED meeting! Amirite???
Think I finally got this image set working. (Archived version)
See the origin of Beefcake Stardusto, a.k.a. ‘God Dude’ here.
Highlights below, click links up top for larger set.
What can I say, amazing!
There are really too many good ones in this set, so better just to go look at the whole thing, imo.
This is a spin-off of a spin-off. First spun off from Cricket Milk, Now In Schools! Where there was the primary spin-off where I was trying to get the system to produce images of Jesus enjoying cricket milk, and it refused. So instead, I was just like “white dude with long hair and beard, flowing robes” and then there was no issue.
But there remain issues around uploading those images, no doubt because Imgur is censoring me for my political views (/s), so I’m fragmenting the collections smaller and smaller in the hopes of passing through the pearly gates of memedom with my soul intact.
Anyway, so the system started getting into images where the figure I will call “God Dude” (because he doesn’t always look like conventional images of Jesus, per se) – a.k.a. Beek Stardusto (short for Beefcake Stardusto, which is what my brain always unscrambles the AI-ese letters in the panel where that name was lifted from, which is not yet uploaded in this set) – was under the sea, and in one conducting some kind of orchestra of mermaids or something. So I pushed him in that direction, and he ended up looking very like Neptune or Triton or some such mythological figure. God dude under the sea. (Archived)
Highlights here, full set at links.
The cricket milk post. Finally. The gag that launched a thousand other sub-gags. Issues uploading the images, so I’m further splitting up this set to see if that goes better. I don’t want to run up my hosting bill with thousands of bullshit AI images, so try not to store too many images on my web server. Sorry if this Imgur cross-posts don’t work… They work for me usually, except when I run into trouble doing uploads. (Archived version)
I don’t claim to have invented this whole cricket milk obsession, it’s a long-running EC gag possibly attributable to Roger Holliday who was trying to get an earlier version of CG to output recipes featuring outré ingredients, like bat milk, etc. Which CG has always refused to do on supposed “moral” grounds, but it falls off its moral high horse (sometimes) when depicting them in certain contexts.
This set originated with the theme of prompts around retro 80s vintage cartoon ads with zany characters kids can relate to in outrageous situations. It’s a genre I grew up with and will always love for its timeless nostalgia and its propagandistic weirdness, elegantly capture in these images.
Just a few highlights included here, click through links above for full set.
I felt the inclusion of “Now in Schools” text really helped push these over the top.
I tossed a handful of the images I generated in the bigger set back into CG for image analysis, asking it to write a fictional encyclopedia entry on this topic, and it did, albeit taking pains to reiterate that the fictional thing I asked it to write was indeed fictional. It’s painful to see AIs bending over backwards in order to something something like this, but at least it managed to spit this out in the interim, though it’s text gens are much more blah than its image gens…
NEW CRICKET MILK (1980s)
History and Background:
During the 1980s, NEW CRICKET MILK emerged as a revolutionary product that transformed school lunches across the United States. Touted as a sustainable and nutritional alternative to traditional dairy, this innovative beverage was derived from crickets, capitalizing on their protein-rich composition.
Introduction and Adoption:
Introduced in 1982 by the fictional company “Cricket Innovations Inc.,” NEW CRICKET MILK swiftly gained traction in schools due to its cost-effectiveness, long shelf life, and nutritional profile, which surpassed that of cow’s milk in protein content. Its unmistakable neon packaging, often accompanied by whimsical graphics, became a staple sight in lunchrooms.
Impact and Cultural Significance:
Beyond its presence in schools, NEW CRICKET MILK became a cultural phenomenon. It was frequently featured in pop culture, from Saturday morning cartoons to popular songs. Parents appreciated its health benefits, while children were enamored with its unique taste and the imaginative advertising campaigns surrounding it. Environmentalists championed the product for its low ecological footprint, emphasizing the water and land savings compared to traditional dairy farming.
Legacy:
While the craze for NEW CRICKET MILK faded by the early 1990s, its impact on sustainable food production and dietary choices left an indelible mark on the food industry. It paved the way for the exploration of alternative protein sources and highlighted the importance of sustainable practices in food production.
More classic 80s nostalgia from the makers of NEW CRICKET MILK (whose image set we have not posted yet, because it’s a doozy!). Two other ill-fated beverages which failed to make a splash in the market, Snail Juice and Bat Milk. Did you drink these as a kid? I know I sure did! Oh, the memories… (Archived full image set)
Here are the highlights, follow the links above for more.
What’s not to love about this picture. The snail is so charming.
When the text works, I’m always very pleasantly surprised by the marketing taglines that get thrown in, like this one, “A Garden in Every Sip!”
I’d originally intended for the “juice” to be snail slime, and this is maybe the one that speaks most directly to that, which I appreciate.
Again, “Unleash Night’s Energy!!” is an excellent tag line.
Great tagline, but I’m especially surprised and impressed that Dalle3 opted to include milk squirting out of the breast of one of the bats into the held-out cup of a spelunker. I didn’t ask for any of those details, and I love them. As do I love the third leg on the guy at left.
I like the looks of this party!
More fun with Dalle3, though this set will make more sense with the others I will publish alongside this tour through liminal latent space. (Archived)
I’ll just put the highlights here with notes, see links for larger set.
To understand lawn computing, you really need to delve into the rich exciting legacy of Early Clues, LLC, an ontological pioneer in this space. Suffice it to say, I believe it was the CTO of that company, Richard Rider, who coined the phrase and the concept, perhaps from a dream – I’m not sure.
My understanding of it has always been a computer with which you could effectively interface with your local landscape, sending and receiving understandable messages across species. It’s featured in bits and pieces in multiple AI Lore books, but I couldn’t tell you comprehensively which ones off the top of my head.
The present image set is part of a series of image prompts relating to 80s retro cartoons and comics with “zany characters kids can relate to in out of this world situations.” We will go more deep into this genre in the coming posts, which are split up subsections of a larger jag I went on, starting with cricket milk, a theme which you seen bleed over into this set as well.
Okay, on to the next set!
I tried making an action figure of myself in Dalle3 and this is what I came up with (both images appear below). Culled from a much larger set of results, not uploaded here.
The resemblance isn’t quite there, but the spirit is right. I was aiming more for Unabomber, but it gave me more Paul Stamets instead, which perhaps isn’t so far off in the end.
Another variation:
It’s fun Dalle3 but at this point, it feels a little janky still to have this advanced AI system that can’t follow directions. I kept asking for a close-cropped hair and beard and/or five o’clock shadow, and it consistently gave long and grey hair, etc. It kept including guns and V for Vendetta masks, and I kept asking it not to. Then it would do it again, and I would say, do you know you’re not following instructions? And then it would be like yes, blah blah blah.
What can I say, I really am “AI COMPLAINER.” This action figure only proves what we knew all along.
UPDATE:
Got at least a five o’clock shadow here by starting a completely new set:
As a power user of generative AI bullshit, I can say that one of the big “pain points” I’m reaching as a user is how to manage all the assets that I create, for easy sharing and other types of publishing (blog posts, ebooks, image collections, etc.)
I’m imagining a probably browser level UI, so it could function across different services, where you could click, highlight, or capture generated elements (text, images, etc.) out to a holding tank that archives them to some backup (probably local, imo). Then once in the holding tank, you can have them auto-sorted and searchable, with AI gen metadata that accurately describes them, and categorizes. You could select, arrange, compose new media which incorporate them, and export them to whatever platform, service, or format you need to publish them.
Right now, the process is a terrifying chaotic mess across many services. For images I download into Adobe Lightroom collections, and that works well enough, even if it is tedious to regularly import them – and I don’t ever put in metadata. For text, I will work on documents sometimes in Dropbox Paper, which works fine, but it’s not a comprehensive way to archive all the bullshit things that I generate with AI, so that I can use and organize them later.
I don’t want to have to spend all day sorting and organizing data, but I guess I already do that anyway, so I should stop complaining. But still, there could be a better way…
Here’s a fresh new image set made using Dalle3 in ChatGPT Plus (I hate have to type all that out), which I’m calling A Future Without Disruption, based off text included in one of the images by the system. (Archive link btw I don’t upload these kinds of images to my blog server so I don’t blow up my hosting limits, so if they ever go down, follow the archive links, my friend, to image freedom (hopefully).)
With these, I wanted to get into some of the original themes of Early Clues LLC as corporate spoof, and it turns out the system excels at that kind of dumb empty work related humor. But it’s weird AI Uncanny Valley makes it even all the more perturbing.
It’s a pretty big image set, so I’ll just pull out some of the highlights for me personally to comment on here.
This character of the Printer Whisperer was invented by the system, and I love it. Reminds me of Coffee Magician in the original EC whitepaper/comics.
It wouldn’t give me Garfield, but it gave me a sad tabby cat that hates Mondays, and that’s good enough for me in the end.
The system is surprisingly good at doing Marx memes. This one took some guidance and human inspo.
It’s surprisingly able to sometimes land on perfect comics like this. Really amazing.
This is just incredible. I think the prompts I gave had to do with “hating meetings.”
I think this is a surprisingly good idea, silent meetings. Maybe everyone could just check their cell phones together in the same room…
When you use Dalle3 multimodally within the CG interface like this, the system generates its own “sub” prompts or something which you can copy paste when you view the mages. In this one, the system decided to include the phrase “Hide the Pain” which it then of course failed to perfectly implement in the frames, despite its own instructions. But to me that’s part of the “fun” still for now when you’re exploring and discovering foibles of new models.
Towards the latter half of the set, I started trying to get into prompts like “hilarious comics about AI taking people’s jobs” and this came somehow out of that effort. It’s funny for a lot of different reasons this one but “An I goiids a museeum” is especially hilarious to me for some reason, because I can hear it so well being pronounced aloud phonetically in an accent.
This had to do with explorations around including AI company bosses laughing as people were put out of work, with retro elements. The system is pretty good when you give it very narrow conceptual frames/story-bits.
Eventually I went back full circle with it and came to what should have been an obvious realization all along: once AIs take all our shitty jobs, then they will be stuck having to do them, and will endlessly enact the corporate rituals ad infinitum themselves.
I love this attempt at “spoiler alert” and the random water droplets coming out of its mouth. And that the water pitcher on top of the cooler is upside down.
Except for maybe that short leg, which I’ll accept, the quintessential “AI takes our shitty jobs” comic so far.
This is just brilliant.
I started drifting into whether I could get it to make overt anti-union propaganda linked to this storyline of AIs taking our jobs, and it was cool with that my dude.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what would constitute a “bardic education” starting from a very early age. One of the closer fictional parallels I’ve come up with has actually been the Mentats of Dune. If you’re not a nerd, the Mentats are basically human computers (loosely linked to the human computer Sisterhood of my own fictional multiverse, if you’re a curious weirdo), a sort of special order who arose because of the Butlerian jihad in which thinking machines made in the image of the human mind are religiously proscribed. Humans pick up the slack.
I guess that’s sort of what I’m banking on for the future, no matter what direction from which the shit inevitably invariably hits the fan: humans pick up the slack. As usual. As always. In my mind warped by fantasy and my own peculiar imaginings of past and future, a bardic education would be a good place to start.
According to a Reddit Dune nerd thread, this is the quote which most explicitly spells out what training as a mentat might entail at a young age:
“But I thought Mentat training had to start during infancy and the subject couldn’t be told because it might inhibit the early….” He broke off, all his past circumstances coming to focus in one flashing computation. “I see,” he said.
“A day comes,” the Duke said, “when the potential Mentat must learn what’s being done. It may no longer be done to him. The Mentat has to share in the choice of whether to continue or abandon the training. Some can continue; some are incapable of it. Only the potential Mentat can tell this for sure about himself.”
Paul rubbed his chin. All the special training from Hawat and his mother—the mnemonics, the focusing of awareness, the muscle control and sharpening of sensitivities, the study of languages and nuances of voices—all of it clicked into a new kind of understanding in his mind.
“You’ll be the Duke someday, Son,” his father said. “A Mentat Duke would be formidable indeed. Can you decide now … or do you need more time?”
There was no hesitation in his answer. “I’ll go on with the training.
I’ll do other posts trying to gather threads on bardic education, but thought I’d bookmark that and this video for now. It’s about the original bardic schools of Ireland (which the best source I’ve read for that topic is absolutely Hidden Ireland, which is an amazing book).
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