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.
I’ve been converted as of v5. I always hated the style before, I felt like every time you looked at v4 and lower, it always had that “Midjourney” look which didn’t look bad, I just didn’t like it. Now with v5 that’s gone and I freakin’ love it!
Compared to Adobe Firely, MJ v5 makes it look like the mediocre offering that it is. I have a hard time after this experience thinking it would be fun to go back to Dall-E or Stable Diffusion either, but I suppose the new thing eventually loses its sparkle too… More on MJ later.
You know it’s important and hard-hitting when both BroBible and Unilad are carrying it (possibly originating with the Daily Star?). Terminator director James Cameron is quoted as saying:
“AI could have taken over the world and already be manipulating it, but we just don’t know because it would have total control over all the media and everything. What better explanation is there for how absurd everything is right now? Nothing makes better sense to me.”
I’ve written about this before vis-a-vis the AI hegemony, that we’ve already been effectively living under AI rule via social media platforms for more than a decade culturally, globally. So, it seems like the inevitable throughline of that is one day we dispense with the charade of the old systems and tilt headlong into overt AI rule.
In fact, this is pretty much the plot of my second (manually-written) book, Conspiratopia (a novella), in which a young unwitting conspiracy dude is drawn into a web of lies after being exposed to the AI Virus by seeing an ad on social media (see also).
In a way, I think this also connects to what Jaron Lanier was talking about w/r/t social media platforms driving users (probably unintentionally, but who knows) towards a sort of composite personality that expresses all the foibles and fragility built into the technology itself.
Also, if you follow the logic of sci-fi author Charles Stross, who claims that corporations are “slow motion” AIs already, then we’ve been under the thumb of these entities for hundreds of years already…
I’ve used a loooot of AI image generators by now. I’ve gone whole hog on this just about every day since August of last year. Which is why it’s shocking to me huge companies like Microsoft & Adobe don’t seem to have picked up on a few basic and absolutely essential features for generative AI image results pages:
Click to enlarge image results
No, clicking and having it enlarge on its own URL/page doesn’t count (sorry Bing!). Just let me click on it quick to see it bigger and click out of the modal to have it go back to regular thumbnail. This helps me know if I want to download.
Flip through image results using left right arrows
OpenAI is actually the only one I’ve used that does this, and it’s so basic I can’t believe they don’t all copy it.
One-click download from any view
This one is also quite simple: let me download it with a one click button (not a multi-click menu option) no matter the view I’m in
Download them all
An option to download all results at once
Image filenames reflect source model & prompt text & date
There I said it. Bing’s image creator now says “powered by Dall-e” and news articles quoted Microsoft as saying they’re using the “latest version” which people on Reddit are saying is the new experimental Dall-e version.
I tried Adobe Firefly and the results were okay, but the UI is… kinda bad & confusing how it works. The results were pretty so so, but at least different in style than the others. I do still appreciate Adobe did theirs based on images they have licenses to use.
I wrote already about Adobe’s new implementation of Content Credentials and finally just got access to Firefly, their new image generation tool. Curiously, all you have to do to remove the content credentials is open the image(s) in Photoshop and resave them (making sure it’s still a JPG).
Poof!
No more content credentials.
To test this out yourself, upload your original Firefly image here (this is Adobe’s tool). Then save your image in Photoshop & re-upload it. For your original uploads direct out of Firefly, you should see something like this:
In the sidebar, you see it says “Generated image” along the the date, AI model used, the signer (Adobe), and a summary that says “This content was generated with an AI tool.”
If you do that with the same file after saving it in Photoshop, you will instead get the message in the right sidebar:
No Content Credentials attached
There are no Content Credentials attached to this file.
Presumably the cause of this is I have Content Credentials turned off in Photoshop, which is resulting in not just a gap in the data, but the data being stripped out altogether. That seems a little weird, unless you don’t want this data attached to your files. Then this is good news, because it means it’s relatively easy to get rid of. You could write a macro or make a batch action or whatever to resave files in a folder, and you’re done.
Bonus: Remove watermark with content-aware fill
While you’re at it, if you don’t want that watermark to appear, the answer is quite easy. Just make a lasso around it, and then go to Edit > Content-aware fill.
Poof!
You’re done. It’s not always quite perfect (and feathering your selection edge might be in order), but it does a decent job. Now you can add that to your batch action to remove content credentials.
I know it’s early yet, but if both of these are so easy to remove, it’s worth making them optional, so users who don’t want them don’t have to jump through hoops for no real reason.
