Month: May 2023

Unsatisfied with the results I got using ChatGPT and Midjourney to explore the film Home Alone, I shifted genres to science fiction, thinking it would be a better fit for the technology. The results I got were visually much more interesting, and the potential for creativity was broader given that there were fewer constraints on what I could use as prompts.

At this stage, I began prompting ChatGPT to come up with a specific species of alien, and based on that description then prompted Midjourney to create an image of it. I thought I could then create an Alien encyclopedia, one that treated each species in a pseudo-scientific way, mimicking the way that science fiction often attempts to use real science as a basis for its fictitious worlds.

I asked ChatGPT to create encyclopedia entries for each alien species and created a publication with the images and descriptions, but I found that the narratives were not engaging enough to be interesting and the richness of the images was somewhat lost in this format.

The first half of Unit 3 was somewhat circuitous and unfocused. The idea was to explore the potential of ChatGPT and Midjourney (AI image generator), but it was difficult to land on exactly what I wanted to do and why. Perhaps because the technology is so new, most of the work became about testing the boundaries of its creativity, seeing what kind of content it could create and in the process understand best practices to get the most out of it.

Initially one of the ideas I had was to use ChatGPT and Midjourney to create a fan fiction zine about popular 90s films. I began by looking at the movie Home Alone, as it was made in 1990, and asked Chat GPT to create different articles, poems and short stories about the movie. I then asked Midjourney to generate images that could populate the zine. In the end, I found it impossible to create something of substance that I was happy with, but it was an interesting lesson in the dark arts of creative AI.