My First Chat GPT Image: Space Cowboy (aka The Bloginator)

Way back in 2013 I cobbled an image together in Photoshop combining my head - cut from a photo of me as a kid dressed in a cowboy outfit - and overlaying it onto a toy Premier Plastics spaceman. I added 'The Bloginator' moniker and put it in a post. It was goofy, but fun.

Taking the image, sans script, I ran it through Chat GPT to see what would happen. 

Now, I've been on the fence with this whole AI thing for some time. Most of the hobby groups I belong to in facebook don't allow AI images and there's quite a bit of ambivalence towards it out there. I've seen it done well and I've seen it screwed up too. Imagine seeing an AI generated person move their arm in a video, and part of the arm moves while part of the arm sort of hangs out by itself elsewhere on the image. Clumsy. I've also seen guys animate Little Green Army Men figures that still have the bases attached. Also clumsy. A bunch of guys in the toy train community have used Chat GPT to generate heralds or signs for their YouTube channels, from which they had stickers made, and they're not too bad. The designs tend to have 'thick' components: heavy lines, in-your-face images. Not very subtle, but overall still pretty decent.

So, I approached this with a bit of trepidation. Anywho, it only took about 5-6 minutes to generate the image below after figuring out how to load the image and give instructions. Instructions were actually minimal. I typed in "attach head to body" and it came back with an slightly modified picture of my head on the toy spaceman (it colorized my head). I didn't save a copy of that attempt. My second (and last) command was simple: "make the spacesuit more realistic". That was it. The image rendered below, complete with desert background, was the result:

hahahahaha I like it!

One of the arguments against using AI is that it takes away 'creativity' and I bought into that for some time. But look at this image. There is no way in hell I have the ability to draw this well. I'm not an artist, I'm not an illustrator, and I'm not a animator. I'm a schmuck with a camera that sometimes takes a few nice pictures! That's it.

Will I use Chat GPT again? You betcha! HOWEVER, I don't want this to become an AI-centric blog. I will continue to experiment with it and continue to post occasional images and see how it all works out.

Ed