The Mandate focuses on topics that men don’t like to talk about. It’s written by Olympic Medalist and frequent Men’s Health contributor Jason Rogers. If you were forwarded this email, subscribe below.
Try to imagine the following: The Met Gala if it were overtaken by ghoulish celebrities. Sacha Baran Cohen’s Borat if he were restyled as Dr. Strange. Or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich fashioned into a Rubik’s cube. Yes, that’s right. It’s both delicious and fun. You might think that these visual anomalies were born from a brilliant or deranged artist’s mind. However, each of these genre-bending images we’re the product of AI.
If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately, you’ll know that AI art-generating tools have now gone mainstream. In a matter of seconds, you can type a prompt into one of these platforms and conjure up the kind of otherworldly visions you could only encounter in a psychedelic dream. It’s so easy, in fact, that many creative types are speaking out against the use of technology. The AI-created image below won a recent art contest, and the other participating artists were thoroughly pissed.
These platforms, however, are not creating art from scratch, a point that has caused a number of complaints. Each tool has amassed a huge bank of images scraped from the web, and the machine learning software effectively recombines visual work that already exists. You can also type “in the style of” along with an artist's name, and the resulting work will copy that style. This has set off a number of concerns about artists’ IP.
However, for the purposes of this article, let’s put those concerns aside. I decided to try Midjourney’s AI bot, which I accessed through the company’s discord server. After fiddling around with some exploratory queries, I decided to repeatedly prompt the bot might yield. Of course, there’s no way that the AI could have understood the actual question that I was trying to scratch at. Nevertheless, I was both fascinated and terrified by the results. Here’s a brief sampling…
One of the first images the Midjourney bot created featured two Dostoyevskian men who look like their muscles and body hair were removed and later reconstituted as bespoke suits from Savile Row. Those are some beefy lapels, my friend!
Later, it created a photograph depicting a band of children wandering through a post-apocalyptic world. It seemed to speak to the climate crisis we will soon face if aggro-politicos remain at the wheel.
Then the bot created an image of a business titan which immediately made me think of the author Ayn Rand whose life philosophy could be summarized as: “every man for himself.”
Later, this one…I really have no idea what’s going on in this image. The boy is either being lobotomized or getting a haircut. You be the judge.
I quite enjoyed the above image. This man could have walked off the runways of John Galliano or Alexander McQueen if the year were 2075. The Wild One meets The Predator, but make it fashion.
Actually the above image was one of the first results, but I thought this one should close the show. All I really have to say is he seems…nice?
Again, Midjourney created this series with the prompt “the future of masculinity.” I only added a few modifying commands that directed the tool to use newer or older versions of its algorithm. And because they draw from publically available images, they seem to have the capacity to channel collective thought. That is, prompting the tool is kind of like asking a thousand artists to synthesize all of their thoughts, emotions, and predictions together in a single piece of work.
I should note, however, that Midjourney is well known for creating work that tends to be off-putting. (Hence, why most of the images look like the love children of Francis Bacon and Salvador Dali). I probably would have received a more upbeat result if had run the same prompt using another tool. I shouldn’t get too navel-gazing about this, especially because I did this exercise for fun and to see how this technology works. But I do wonder if there’s something interesting we can extrapolate from this. What does this say about where we are headed? Should we be scared?
Freaky
Super-interesting and timely post Jason. Definitely something that I question, not just as a creative, but as a father that is cautious about my sons' interactions with technology and images they are fed. I feel like we need to be really thoughtful and communicative with how we use tech like this as a tool for creation and portrayal.