Pretty October

 

  I find the story behind how I came to achieve these results (seen in the digital painting I did above) to be of interest, at least to myself and perhaps a few oddly like-minded individuals who have come to appreciate some of the finer aspects of the AI-assisted digital art revolution currently exploding in the midst of a tsunami of paradigm-shifting changes taking affect this moment the whole wide world over.    

     Eight years ago, during early August 

I posted a poem on my TWILIT blog called Pretty.   

PRETTY



I secure a darkest vision
I hold its hand as it walks down
The cellar stairs lack precision
In the dark there hides a clown
It is smiling very loudly
For look what it has found




   I wanted to try an experiment converting text prompts into random digital images super-intricately wrought by AI algorithms, so I copy pasted the six lines of this poem, word for word, into DALL*E and clicked generate.

   (Nevermind the fact that I'd already considered that this poem could also be titled Pennywise, I prefer my own original title anyhow, for various reasons, not the least of which is that one of my mentors, St. Giraud, may his anima rest in pax, already beat me to the Punch by having written a poem under that moniker, and besides I ran it as a variant in one of my blogs once, and I don't think anyone really noticed.)


   The 4 variants that DALL*E assembled and presented to me, which is to say the first series of iterations of their literal interpretations of the significance of those six lines of poesy, yielded three right up front that were preposterous in not only their garish aspect, but in how far from my hoped-for expectations these results actually strayed. That is, except for the 4th variant, which despite also not even coming anywhere near the spirit of intention behind my lines of verse, at the very least uncannily resembled the female countenance of an ordinary person in a setting presumably to be construed as necessarily being down in the basement, albeit that of a maximum penitentiary.

   "This one will do," I thought to myself as I dl'd the raw image to my hd. From there, I uploaded it to my Deep Dream Generator account, and there I ran it through my universal colorizer template with the standard settings weighted at their 50% default. The glorious results you see depicted at the very top of this article, I decided to title "October," in a nod to the current month, but also because something indefinable whispered for me to do it. Even as I can see the connotations implicit between the final image and the new title, something inside me is now adding to the harmonious refrain, the suggestion that it not only retain the original title, Pretty, but I now am being forced to consider that this final creepy rendering of the image which was rendered from my poem may have strangely presented itself as the ideal illustration for it, after all.  

    Idk.   What do you think?  (Of the 3 followers  that appear to have remained, I don't even know if Austin Pray is getting this in his inbox, or what.  That's okay...I've long become accustomed to the fact that my blogging for all these years is largely to a gallery of ghosts...).  . .