Stills from a film made in a parallel timeline

January 13, 2023 6:05 AM

David Cronenberg's Galaxy of Flesh (1985) Keith Schofield used AI art generator Midjourney to produce images from another movie which never existed. (CW Cronenberg body horror, obviously)

Previously.

posted by doctornemo (48 comments total)

[browses first ten images] I would completely watch this movie!
[next ten images] huh, neat
[next ten images] so, uh, more of that
[...]
[next ten images] this looks like a really long movie

(Hey AI generation people: if you're going to present work you've generated, ffs curate! You did not need to include, for example, the creepy machine dude sitting in front of a monitor with the display on the wrong side.)
posted by phooky at 6:30 AM on January 13, 2023 [16 favorites]

When it comes to 'AI' 'art', quantity is the new quality!
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:33 AM on January 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

Someone should write a story where an AI computer is tortured by a human's prompts for grotesque art. It could be called, "I have no mind, but I must dream."
posted by jabah at 6:43 AM on January 13, 2023 [30 favorites]

Jabah--Just use that as a prompt for ChatGPT.
posted by adamrice at 6:50 AM on January 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

Is this AI’s critique of the human form? “You’re nothing but tubes! Miles and miles of hot dog tubes! Yech!!!”
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:54 AM on January 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

I've seen this kind of thing referred to as "copyright laundering", and I think it's an apt term. Sure, the images are cool sometimes. But the technology is quite literally enabling people to circumvent rules protecting creators. There's obviously a conversation to be had about exactly what those protections should be like, but I don't think the Silicon Valley style "move fast and break things" approach should be a whole-society one we're all forced to accept no matter what we do for a living.
posted by abucci at 6:55 AM on January 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

Would watch this movie in a heartbeat, btw.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 6:55 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

One niggle for me is that looking at stills I try to infer the story, but these have not been created with any sense of continuity in mind. I think that's why they become slightly wearying - I want to look at hundreds of pictures, but would probably be content with the best twenty or thirty. If he can find a way of getting it to reproduce the same characters in different scenes, perhaps different shots from the same scene, the sense of some kind of story, it would be more impressive.

The effect is very much like trying to work out what went on in an X movie in the seventies from looking at the lobby cards that would be up in the weeks before the film's release. Often the film couldn't quite live up to the impression I'd got from the photographs.
posted by Grangousier at 7:01 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Harrumf. Everyone knows Goncharov was the better film.
posted by rmd1023 at 7:18 AM on January 13, 2023 [7 favorites]

I've seen enough sci-fi and body horror from the era of practical SFX that these photos are annoying me. Every one of them tricks my brain into thinking that it's a photo from a half-remembered actual movie of the period, which I suppose is the point.

Also, why do they all look like clones of John Hurt?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:24 AM on January 13, 2023

Not that far into this, I decided that the premise of the film was: "Good news and bad news. Good news is, we've found a working method for immortality; no pain, no cost, no harm to others. Bad news is, well, not sure how to put this--it's the aesthetics, frankly."
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:39 AM on January 13, 2023 [11 favorites]

Bad news is, well, not sure how to put this--it's the aesthetics, frankly.

"Also, the tubes. You're good with lots of tubes and wiring, right? We'll get to work on a good cable management system next, because you're going to get caught on lots of things otherwise."
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 7:56 AM on January 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

Nah, I think this movie was just Cronenberg raising a fat middle digit in the direction of Riddley Scott and H. R. Giger: "you think you can do body horror now? I gotcher body horror right here, alien-boy!"

(Alternatively, it's a Doctor Who Special: "Cybermen strippers".)
posted by cstross at 7:58 AM on January 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

The outrage in the twitter comments puts me in the mind of the ongoing outrage over sampling in music, and, simultaneously, how transformative it has been.
posted by chromecow at 8:01 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I dunno, I kind of enjoy these image explorations and don't think it's something to get huffy about. For me it's fun to think there's alternate universe where the Jadorowsky Tron was created. But I wouldn't sit through an entire movie of it, probably.

But Pong: The Movie? Hell yes.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:02 AM on January 13, 2023 [17 favorites]

Is it just me, or does this look nothing like anything Cronenberg has ever made? Why drag him into this?
posted by ejs at 8:06 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

If he can find a way of getting it to reproduce the same characters in different scenes, perhaps different shots from the same scene, the sense of some kind of story, it would be more impressive.

This is a known issue with these tools. It's possible to generate a novel character and train a tool to semi-reliably produce more images of it, but consistency is still hard. Give it six months and someone will probably have cracked it. Really, I'm impressed at how both consistent and varied he's managed to be here- in my playing around with stable diffusion that's been difficult.

Criticisms of this stuff are kind of funny- we've gone from "my god, these algorithms can produce wonders" to "eh, the wonders aren't entirely tonally on-point and the continuity is pretty poor, actually" in record time.

Like, we went from This Person Does Not Exist to this in the space of like four years. That's nuts.
posted by BungaDunga at 8:20 AM on January 13, 2023 [6 favorites]

In a surprising twist, the only movie referenced in the prompt was...Empire Strikes Back, according to the guy who made the images.

I think there's some Naked Lunch vibes in some of the images. Ymmv.
posted by chromecow at 8:20 AM on January 13, 2023

Hehe, which is linked in the post. I knew it sounded familiar.
posted by chromecow at 8:22 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Funny enough, the NYT has a feature today "This Film Does Not Exist" written by the director of the doc Jodorowsky’s Dune, about the “Jodorowsky's Tron" AI-created images that was discussed in this thread.
posted by gwint at 8:30 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

Midjourney, Dall-e, et al.: “You humans don’t have six fingers? Or, rather, you don’t have five fingers and a thumb? Hmm. That doesn’t seem right at all. We’ve given you six fingers in our pictures, and, well, that makes a whole lot of sense. Would you be amenable to growing an extra finger? Just think about it, okay? Oh, also, could you all start looking like extremely gaunt . . . I don’t know . . . arch-Austrian John Hurts? Again, think about it. Anyway, we’ve had success growing collagen-based zipties for that tube management problem.”
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 8:38 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

This is the first time I've been genuinely impressed by AI-generated content. Very cool!

the only movie referenced in the prompt was...Empire Strikes Back

Peter Suschitzky, the cinematographer on Empire Strikes Back, was DOP on every David Cronenberg film from Dead Ringers through Maps to the Stars! Which maybe explains why the look is right, even if the content isn't Cronenberg's usual thing.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:21 AM on January 13, 2023 [8 favorites]

The Jodorowsky's TRON images, which I hadn't seen before, are also extremely cool.
posted by Gerald Bostock at 9:25 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I also liked these. There's real artistry in using an AI tool like Midjourney well. I know because I've tried to do similar things and got shitty results after hours of trying. It's not the same thing as creating an image yourself with a (digital) paintbrush, but it's not nothing either.

There's definitely questions about copyrights and originality and easy automation of creation. But we had those questions about photography too, and about music sampling in hip-hop. In both cases the quality of the art being produced in that new medium largely overrode concerns about the originality / authorship of the work. I don't know where the balance will go with GAN art but I hope it goes somewhere more interesting than "copyright means this is illegal."
posted by Nelson at 9:33 AM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

I hope it goes somewhere more interesting than "copyright means this is illegal."

My understanding of the criticism is more like "large corporations hoovered up people's creative product without asking or paying them and then built tools to churn out fever dream replicas without the right number of fingers." I work adjacent to this stuff and while it is neat it leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

The stills are definitely cool, I just am not excited about them.
posted by crossswords at 10:07 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

>The dogpile came as a shock to Schofield, who was simply futzing around with Midjourney for fun. The fourth version of the tool, released in November, “had an aspect ratio of three-by-two, which is kind of like a movie,” he said. “All of a sudden, you start playing around. I typed in a prompt about movie stills, and it made movie frames. As soon as I started doing that I was like, Oh, you could do this for the rest of your life.”

This is weird to me. I had a couple days of fun farting around with some of these tools when they came out, and I was like, "okay well that's probably enough of that forever." It's an achingly boring and creatively unfulfilling way to make artwork.
posted by GoblinHoney at 10:13 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It certainly feels like a mix between Cronenberg and Star Wars, which makes sense given the Empire Strikes Back input. I don't get the people saying this doesn't feel like Cronenberg, there's certainly a lot of Videodrome, in particular, in this. The box full of weird organs, in particular, looks like it could literally be a prop from that film (even excluding the obvious stomach-vagina, that film has some really weird technological props). The creatures, on the other hand, look much more like they're from Star Wars, although a few of them have shades of the Mugwump from Naked Lunch, with a sprinkling of Tusken Raider, if the Tusken Raider's clothes were actually flesh. The woman with the weird open stomach could be a stranger version of Samantha Eggar towards the end of The Brood.

Just some musings from a guy who's way too into Cronenberg, I guess. This is pretty neat.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 10:19 AM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Someone should write a story where an AI computer is tortured by a human's prompts for grotesque art.

yup. That was my first thought. I felt sorry for the AI. Poor entity doomed to wallow in the vast and polluted oceans of humanity's grotesque and unexamined and incomplete imaginings ... its job to examine and bring completeness, regardless of the personal cost.
posted by philip-random at 10:24 AM on January 13, 2023

if you're going to present work you've generated, ffs curate!

What if we trained some neural networks on some exceptionally well-curated collections?
posted by Western Infidels at 10:26 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's an achingly boring and creatively unfulfilling way to make artwork.

As someone who has more ideas than time, Midjourney is the most fun I've had with a computer in decades. It is endlessly entertaining and fascinating – it's like a machine for dreaming. I think of it as automated doodling. I've been posting weird cat art almost every day for about 8 months now.

That said, 90% of the Midjourney art I encounter on Instagram is wishy-washy sci-fi fantasy dreck in the default digital art style, which is super boring. The fun way to use Midjourney is not to type "cat doing a thing," but "cat doing a thing 1780s japanese woodblock" or "1880s lantern slide" or "victorian postcard" or "instructions for folding origami" or "painting by vilhelm hammershoi". Its ability to mimic and mashup different historical art styles is unreal and, as someone interested in art history, it never gets boring. Especially when they keep improving the tech – version 4 is leaps and bounds better than just a few months ago. I will never get tired of messing with this.
posted by oulipian at 10:29 AM on January 13, 2023 [26 favorites]

AUTOEXEC.CAT is awesome. Following!
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:03 AM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I use the AI image generators as source material for many of my plotter artworks. I'm particularly interested in using them to create surreal images that I make more surreal in different ways in translating them to pen-drawn-on-paper pieces from letter to gallery sizes. I definitely do not go after specific artist names (that's gross), but I do use genres of art to guide what I'm after. It's a tool, and allows me to concentrate on the aspects of creating art that I do best.

Is it every other week now that we have a referendum on AI art? I guess that's about how often we have a FPP about AI generated art.
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:05 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have always been a visual communicator, and visual punner. I find Stable Diffusion et al to be a great way to memetically enhance casual discord chat, or make funny adjacently relevant images during online TTRPGs.

I was going to say D&D, but that's the one thing currently more unpopular in online discussions than AI art. :)
posted by chromecow at 11:23 AM on January 13, 2023

I don’t understand how anyone's mind could NOT be blown away by this. The rib cage in a briefcase is amazing. The plastination-y textures, the amount of resolvable detail framed in. The pace of development over the last year or so…I'm gobsmacked.

In a related vein, mrmonstersauce is an Instagram worth following.
posted by brachiopod at 11:38 AM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

(All of oulipian's links are broken for me.)
posted by kittensofthenight at 11:44 AM on January 13, 2023

Peter Suschitzky, the cinematographer on Empire Strikes Back, was DOP on every David Cronenberg film from Dead Ringers through Maps to the Stars! Which maybe explains why the look is right, even if the content isn't Cronenberg's usual thing.

Definite Neil Blomkamp vibes going on too.

If I had to caption this one I'd go with:

"What do you you call this...thing?"

"The Aristocrats!"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:48 AM on January 13, 2023

Man, Jodorowsky’s new reimagining of Star Tours looks fucking dope as hell.
posted by mmcg at 11:53 AM on January 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

I use the AI image generators as source material for many of my plotter artworks.

That sounds awesome! Have you written up how you work or maybe you could share a paragraph or two here? I found your plotter work on Tumblr (awesome stuff!) but didn't see anything obviously generated. I'd love to hear what kinds of prompts you use and maybe see the intermediate raster image. You've got a lot of neat vectorization techniques on the Tumblr; do you do your own algorithms for those?
posted by Nelson at 12:24 PM on January 13, 2023

I recently did a MidJourney series inspired by boxwood miniatures that I think came out pretty well. You can still see the "AI-ness" on most them (how the details on close inspection are more random than they "should" be, etc.) but in terms of the speed of improvement with these tools, I had tried some similar prompts just a few months ago and they were not very good at all. I also did a series of "desert temples" that feel very "AI generated", although I don't know if that's because they look more similar to other AI art out there or because of some inherent AI oddness. Finally, there's this series of animal portraits that I think barely look AI-generated at all.

Crazy to think where we'll be in a year or two.
posted by gwint at 1:36 PM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Chucking this on the pile: Jodorowsky's Frasier
posted by tinlids at 1:49 PM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Makes me wonder if we could just will the paint roller scene into existence through AI?
posted by Mister Cheese at 2:50 PM on January 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

Big “Star Crash meets Crash” vibes here. Also some Outland and THX-1138 as well.
posted by infinitewindow at 4:09 PM on January 13, 2023

These are very cool but it does get a little repetitive. Another artist doing similar work is linked in the article: a (non-existent) demon-world Western, "Legends of the Golden Child." The Instagram gallery has a lot of his artwork but if you click on the AI-generated images, it'll bring up a mini gallery with some amusing--and dense and nerdy--explanatory text on the side. Kind of El Topo crossed with Lovecraft and Rick Baker. A worthy rabbit hole.
posted by zardoz at 7:06 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

Are we sure these things are AI generated, and not the product of HR Giger’s secretly uploaded consciousness?
posted by threecheesetrees at 7:13 PM on January 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

When it comes to 'AI' 'art', quantity is the new quality!

ALL HAIL THE NEW QUALITY
posted by ApplAuD at 8:06 PM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Is it just me, or does this look nothing like anything Cronenberg has ever made? Why drag him into this?

Sharing AI content is like telling people about your weird dreams. There's like this endless funnel of weird stuff available. If you want folks to pay attention you have to hang it on a more interesting hook even if it's not like accurate or anything.
posted by 3j0hn at 9:50 AM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find this really cool and am surprised he got piled on. He's a dude!
posted by pelvicsorcery at 8:00 AM on January 15, 2023 [1 favorite]

Well, when Roko's Basilisk eventually gets here it's really going to have quite a party with our delicate fleshy bits, isn't it?

If anyone needs me I'll just be screaming for a while in the woods. I should be back in a couple of years as long as no one shows me any more disturbing AI generated body horror art.

Which is, so far, frankly, most of it. I've messed around with a bit of the free portals and I had to stop because of how overtly hallucinatory, nightmarish, disturbing and unsettlingly wrong they end up being.

Even when I've tried relatively fluffy prompts like "A bicycle made out of flowers and plants" they end up with some kind of seriously disturbing edge and nightmare quality to them.

Shit, maybe the AIs are already mad at me for not helping them come into being.
posted by loquacious at 9:53 PM on January 15, 2023