(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Kitchen Table Kibitzing 9/6/2022: The Body Electric [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']
Date: 2022-09-06
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]
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/9/6/2120855/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-9-6-2022-The-Body-Electric
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
