If you’re following this newsletter, there’s a large chance you know how I look like. (If your mind has somehow alchemized me with my cats, that’s alright too. I’m happy to be two Maine Coons.)
A friend got me access to Midjourney yesterday, and I’ve been utterly obsessed with the damn thing. Over the course of the day, I’ve built a variety of weird generative art. I created versions of the Breaker Queen in honor of C.S Cooney’s absolutely gorgeous Dark Breakers; Candy and Stark from Richard Kadrey’s Sandman Slim; images of Lovecraftian Gods and more.
Then I went, “Wouldn’t it be funny to see if Midjourney could make a self-portrait?”
The first version was hilariously off:
So I added ‘writer’ to the tag, hoping to help Midjourney triangulate on my photos:
Still very much not me, but I recognize how the light sometimes curves along my cheekbones in the third photo, and the mouth in the first and the third feel like a faded ghost of my own image. It’s enough that I keep with the experiment.
The third try yields my nose, and what feels like the AI trying to make sense of the way I quirk my mouth. Trying a self-portrait in Midjourney feels curiously like being hunted. I have the image of the neural network as this ravenous thing, bereft of senses, bereft of context, an infant system groping through the dark, hunting for fragments of me. When I return and chose a variation to pursue, it goes off again, sifting through presumed connections.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s weird to be disassembled this way. It doesn’t fully understand what a face is, but it has an internal logic to help it create one nonetheless, and it will hunt and hunt and hunt, until I tell it that it is enough and it has brought enough of what I want home.
This set was rather upsettingly good, particularly the 4th photo in the series. (The nose, the mouth; I recognize the lighting from some of my selfies, and the hair.)
Anyway, I put it down after that. I don’t really need to be hunted by an AI through the Internet.
I hope everyone’s been well. Here is a cat photo to steer you out of the uncanny valley.
I'll give it one thing, it got your *attitude* in many of your photos pretty quickly!
I like the bottom right of the third set for recognizing you. But did you try to meld your face with two Maine coons yet?