What does that even mean? AI-generated art?

It means that some maniacs have written computer software that can generate images based only on text input. So you can basically just type some text… whatever, and the computer will generate an image based on that text.

I told it to create a “sleep paralysis demon”. We’ll get into why later but…

This wasn’t the first thing I told it to create so I knew that it was going to look pretty fucked up. But I didn’t expect this:

If you’ve seen a sleep paralysis demon, you’ll know that this is pretty fucking accurate. So how did a computer make something this “accurate” (to me at least) that represents a completely “human” experience?

Well, it’s important to understand that the way this software works is that it basically “learns” how to create images by looking at a lot of images. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s enough to make you assume that the software simply based this on some existing artwork.

But this was just one of the 4 images generated from my single text prompt. And I can ask for 4 variations of any of those. So this isn’t actually the first image I got. First I got this:

And then I asked for variations on the bottom left version and got this:

You can also do dumb shit like “impressionist borat”:

Or “sci-fi robot alex trebek”:

Or “archduke metallica”:

Or “a face made of faces”

The possibilities seem endless.