This morning, about 10 hours or so later, it is happily regurgitating the “facts” I included in the article when asked about whether he appeared in an 80s film:
According to an article on Medium by Lost Books, there was a romantic comedy released in 1984 called “Suckered” that featured a young Ron DeSantis. The movie was a box office flop and is mostly forgotten. In “Suckered,” Ron DeSantis played the role of a down-on-his-luck door-to-door vacuum salesman who is looking for love in all the wrong places. The movie was produced by Disney, but it was never released on DVD due to an alleged contractual dispute. As a result, no digital copies of the movie exist today. However, the article claims that they managed to dub some frames from a VHS player recovered from an old Blockbuster video that was being demolished.
It’s important to note that while the article mentions this information, the accuracy and authenticity of the content on Medium cannot be fully verified as it is a platform that allows for user-generated content. Please exercise caution and consider verifying the information from additional sources.
“I try to do funny stuff or trippy art — psychedelic stuff. It just dawned on me: I should do the Pope. Then it was just coming like water: ‘The Pope in Balenciaga puffy coat, Moncler, walking the streets of Rome, Paris,’ stuff like that.”
His reference to it ‘coming like water’ rings a bell of recognition for me, as I’ve experienced periods of flow states using AI tools, especially lately with Midjourney.
I’ve noticed that you can get into kind of a place of creative alignment with the tool at hand, the subject matter, the prompts, the results, etc. Usually this happens when the results are really good, and they keep coming, and you kind of end up surfing a wave in this corner of the latent space you’ve uncovered.
It’s not always like that, though. There’s a lot of stumbling around in order to get there, trying and failing to do certain things, and having the beginnings of understanding what is and isn’t possible within the domain of the tools, and then from that how to do things well and efficiently, and enjoyably.
My hunch is that the future is in cultivating these types of flow states with AI tools, that become deeply intuitive.
Personally, I find it somewhat hilarious that it is someone’s (multiple someones) job to go around and say that fake things are indeed fake. I guess it’s only a matter of time before they come knocking on my door too.
I’ve seen a fairly consistent issue across sets that if you specify a person’s name in prompts, it often will make multiple people in the photo either share all or elements of that person’s face. Or if you identify two people in the photo, their faces and features will be sort of mixed up and blended together.
It’s weird and sometimes annoying, but also one of those fun quirks that I think looking back will be indicative of the time and state of the technology as it stands now. So I don’t mind including a certain contained amount of it as evidence of the times…
I tried for quite a while to get more visuals of like a brawl between Desantis and a costumed Mickey Mouse performer, but the vast majority of them ended up showing Desantis fighting some variation of himself (which is probably correct from a psychological standpoint anyway), or with like Mickey wearing a suit & Desantis having Mickey-glove hands, things like that. So in the end it just seemed simpler to focus on Desantis crying and looking downcast and dejected at the Magic Kingdom.
I’ve noticed something in doing these political caricatures/cartoons using Midjourney, that I find myself at some point in the process feeling sympathetic towards the subject of whatever the piece is I’m working on. Even if I don’t like that person or what they stand for or what they’ve done.
I think this is somehow part of the process of doing a convincing piece of satire/spoof/parody/etc., the ability to sort of see a window into the soul of the subject, and then to be able to reveal that through the images…
This book was written using the EncycGen app I wrote in ChatGPT v4 (though my app is still powered by text-davinci-003). And then supplemented with some other chapters written in ChatGPT v4 as well.
The images were all created in Midjourney v5, which is the first time any of these books use MJ – and certainly not the last. I’m happy with their quality and doing the images helped me come up with more chapters and plot points than the original app generated on its own, which was nice. So a good confluence of tools there.
Very loosely based on this, which I didn’t even watch. My EncycGen app certainly didn’t watch it. Here’s a related video clip:
Wanted to capture Ran Prieur’s thoughts on Hippy Putin & imagination here for safe-keeping:
My favorite thing about being me is imagination. I’m sure that whales can daydream, but can they daydream about being space pirates or alternate world travelers? Of all the things that AI can do for us, the thing I value most is that it can buff our dreams.
For example, through Midjourney V5, Tim explores The Unlikely Hippy Past of Vladimir Putin. I understand the danger of not knowing what’s real, but if you can keep a decent grip on what’s real, young hippie Putin is a really cool unreal thing to think about, and I could not imagine it this well without help from technology.
He said he’s already seen posts in which his images have been co-opted by those looking to criticize the Catholic Church for lavish spending. “I feel like shit,” he said of his images being used in such ways. “It’s crazy.”
I’m gonna go out on a limb here – as someone raised Catholic and who is now a long way from that – but that’s a completely legitimate criticism of the Catholic Church.
I frankly don’t even know what a Balenciaga jacket is, let alone how much one depicted in that image is likely to cost. But I’m confidently able to guarantee you that it is but a small drop in the bucket of the actual price of the vestments and accoutrements that accompany popehood.
And let’s not forget the Catholic Church is the second or third largest land-owner in the WORLD. But my purpose here isn’t (at least not right now) to go on a rant about the incongruities of religious institutions…
I get this might not have been an intended or desirable outcome or message of these images for this artist, and I can relate to just wanting to make something funny and psychedelic in Midjourney, and not having to be bothered thinking through the consequences of it.
But to me, the artist Pablo Xavier here is shirking away from what is essentially the power of these kinds of AI-generated image and the entire genre. That they are intensely charged and loaded with many possible meanings and interpretations depending on the audience is exactly what’s amazing about them. They can be beautiful. They can be weapons. They can be intensely political. They can be all these things at once. This is their power. My gut feeling it to lean into that, and not shy away from it (even though exercising power like that can be somewhat scary as an artist). To use it wisely, for sure, but to use it intentionally not accidentally.
This all feels like proof positive to me around Barthe’s idea of the Death of the Author, that the game rests not (only) in the authorial intent, but in the actual material effect on the reader/viewer as the nexus of interpretation and experience.
Working in Midjourney to do portraits & spoofs of political figures reminds me a hell of a lot of doing caricatures. Having to pick out a few defining features, environments, scenarios, etc. to put a give figure into in order to express some part of their personality, and so on. Feels very familiar for that reason.
Also the way I’ve been using it, I realize, is probably more like as political cartoons than anything else. It’s commentary about the people, about the times, and about the audience and their expectations.
Putting it into those two frames makes it make perfect sense to me, and gives me a handle on how to do it even better.
Having played around a lot with Midjourney these past few days, I can now confidently say: we have reached the stage of what I would consider “weapons grade” generative AI images. Where they are good enough to use for disinformation campaigns, or essentially information warfare.
Now, I’ve seen the tendency of audiences who are in the know to point out foibles or imperfections in these images. But honestly, one of the main complaints I’ve heard from people actually has been they look “too perfect” and in focus.
In the case of Hippy Putin, someone pointed out why would he have all these extremely high quality photos of him, etc. etc. It’s not that these complaints are technically wrong, but that they don’t matter. We can now with an extremely high degree of fidelity depict basically anyone doing anything (or anything that doesn’t butt up against MJ’s extremely weak keyword filtering). Who cares if it looks perfect or not perfect, or somewhere in between?
Because of one single Medium post (and a Reddit link to it) after only a couple days, I now control 4 of the top 11 image results for “Hippy Putin” in Google image search:
That’s without any promotion apart from Google simply crawling Medium & Reddit regularly. That’s without the images having gone viral on any social platforms, or getting picked up and re-used in any YouTube/Tiktok videos, FB posts, etc. And without any “official” debunks or fact-checks. There’s a high likelihood of all of those occurring, given the subject and treatment.
What I want to say is: this is now the new normal. This is hyperreality.
There is no going back to “the way things were.” There is no legislation that is going to stop or slow this down. There is no moratorium signed by X number of bigshots that will make even the slightest dent. There is no amount of hand-wringing and pearl-clutching about harms and labeling, and and and etc. etc. etc. that will undo this present and the future(s) that will spring from it.
And I just want to say actually, I’m not scared anymore. I’m glad. Midjourney v5 stripped away any lingering doubts for me. Now it’s just pedal to the metal. Full force. Whole hog. All the way, all the time. If you can’t keep up, get the hell out of the way. Because this is power, not just as an artist, but as a person with a voice, with a vision, with questions, with anger, with excitement, with stories. In short, a human. This is one step further toward the Imagination Ladder, the mythical place where physical reality and imaginal/experiential reality merge once and for all.
Just like how coding a series of apps in ChatGPT (v4) turned down the noise for me completely on people worrying endlessly about the model yielding “confidently wrong” results, so has using MJ v5 obliterated my reservations. It’s also made me fine to stop using Stable Diffusion, Dall-E and feeling the need to test every new model and service that comes out. This is good enough. This is great. This means war. Let’s go.
