Artificial Images of an Artificial Singer-Songwriter
For the last few years I have been working on a mockumentary radio play about an Irish singer-songwriter called Paschal Quigley (more on that some other time). As a little creative exercise I tried using Midjourney to generate cartoonish caricatures of the character. Perhaps they will form part of the final creative output or perhaps they will just be a creative experiment for my amusement (and yours). In the spirit of sharing work in progress, here are some of my recent efforts.
Despite all the hyperbolic talk about AI tools putting creatives out of jobs, I found it to be an incredibly frustrating process to get images that tallied with the ones in my head. It was able to produce images, even spectacular images, but there was very little control. As I mentioned in a previous post, the AI image outputs are really only as good as the creative mind inputting the instructions. There was also the added complexity of trying to determine the appropriate terminology and instructions. With no proper guides (despite the positive proclamations of many pages I found online) it required a lot of guesswork to even find the right language to use for getting specific cartoon styles for an image. Never mind the specifics of how the character should look.
Ultimately it was a bit of a failed experiment from my perspective, but it did result in some of the cool images you see here. I will continue to play around with these tools though, as I think the creatives who will be out of a job are the ones who fail to use these as a tool in their process. Over to Paschal Quigley for a song to play us out.
