Tag: Art

Using AI tools

On By coilerxiiIn Art, EssayLeave a comment

Someone asked me (and others) if they should use AI for a book cover. As you know, I’m an active AI artist, hardly the hand-art fire eater who scorches it the way Michelangelo scorned oil paints. I still immediately said “No”. Or rather, “in short, no. But rather if you want them to be good it’s going to take a lot more effort than you think.”

If you just do basic prompting, the “pull to the middle” effect of AI means the result is going to look like stereotypical AI Slop. Because it is. Or if you want a more generous interpretation, it’ll look like you used a pre-arranged template. Because a default AI generation is essentially that. In other words, rather than using its power to move past cheap stock covers, AI frequently continues the trend.

Now sometimes you need cheap quick disposable filler, and I’m not arguing against it there. Nor am I suggesting any one right way to do it. But AI or not, if you want to stand out, you still have to work for it.

A Thousand Words: Nip For Speed

On By coilerxiiIn A Thousand Words, Art, ReviewLeave a comment

Nip For Speed

One rarely encounters a work of fiction, much less a video game as deep and enlightening as Nip For Speed. It is a point and click adventure game where you, sitting in the front seat, have to help a cat drive a car. The game is very short but I had a hugely fun time laughing my head off at it.

Make of this what you will, be it a game on materialism, a lecture on the beauty and stress of travel, or just a silly surreal game where you help a cat drive a car.

Another Operator-Ette

On By coilerxiiIn ArtLeave a comment
Image made in Stable Diffusion

One of the things I love doing in Stable Diffusion is adding in a bunch of stylistic prompts and applying it to someone in a military uniform. This young lady here is one of my favorite recent generations.

Meet Claire

On By coilerxiiIn ArtLeave a comment

Meet “Claire Velazquez”, one of my latest AI projects. Claire began life as one of the blank-slate characters with no face. Namely, she was one of the runaways you could control in Road 96, with this random icon being the only clue as to her looks.

So with the only cues being “short hair in some kind of bob” and “glasses”, I turned to prompting various Stable Diffusion models. Claire tends to wear grey working clothes and in her anime depictions has orange eyes.

Claire was a runaway (duh) with a long and “eventful” journey. She managed to escape via truck (the method that avatar used) and find employment outside of Petria.

Review: The Gardner Heist

On By coilerxiiIn Art, ReviewLeave a comment

The Gardner Heist

Ulrich Boser’s The Gardner Heist is about the largest unsolved robbery by price ever. In 1990, two thieves went into the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston and then left an array of paintings worth (albeit by the less than exact standards of painting appraisal) $500,000,000. And as far as concrete undisputed knowledge goes, that’s it. The case has never been solved, zero of the paintings have been found, and not one court-worthy piece of evidence has been made.

I think you can see the problem with someone making a book about this. It’s like DB Cooper. All we know is that a guy jumped out of a plane. From there it’s nothing but speculation and rumor. Boser tries (the sections on how hard it is to track and recover stolen art are excellent), but there’s only so much one can do with basically nothing. A lot of the book is pure padding, which is understandable but not fun to read.

I can’t hold any of Boser’s choices against him. It’s just not a very concrete topic for obvious reasons.