5 YEARS AGO -- we went on Covid lockdown soon after
March 12, 2020, after the last live figure drawing session I attended.
This March hit like a tornado, twisting me into new directions -- I started oil painting again and continued drawing with
colored Sharpies; I hacked a FISKARS FUSE to make
a portable printing press; and I started leaning towards generating images with the new multi-modal LLMs (
Large Language Models) rather than just sticking with image dedicated programs like
Midjourney and
WHISK:
Woman explaining AI ART generation
I started making
bad oil paintings again
Adam setup and installed
Stable Diffusion on a supercomputer at
Quelab about March 24th, so that we can generate AI ART locally for free, without have to access online programs like
Midjourney. I can even access the
Quelab computer remotely, and generate bad AI images from the coffee shop:
Generated ugly FAKE AI ART
on a supercomputer at Quelab
However the real blow to my ego came before then, when AI criticized my AI ART:
PENCIL DRAWINGS
PRINTMAKING
g
on the portable press
and hung it in the entry way of Quelab
AI ART
This month we started changing the way we generate AI ART, by merely "chatting" with an LLM model (which one can even do with their voice when using a microphone):
AI WARS
The AI Wars cranked up at the end of the month, between
China,
Google,
Open AI and others, each racing to outdo the other with a new release. Specifically these general LLMs (
Large Language Models) can now accept and even generate images, being "
multi-modal" (
a term and concept that confused me back in January).
*One could use any of the above programs for free, at least at the moment.
AI Subscriptions
KREA changed their log in window, and offered a 20% discount for yearly subscriptions. So I paid for the Basic subscription on March 31, 2025. I had been using
WAN 2.1 in
KREA recently to generate AI videos:
"LOCAL"
AI ART GENERATION
Adam installed
STABLE DIFFUSION in a
Docker Container. Then I could generate AI images "locally," on the Quelab computer for free, without having to go to services on the Internet like
Midjourney or
WHISK, to generate AI ART. I can even log in remotely, and generate AI images from the coffee house.
Generated on the Quelab computer
MOST importantly,
STABLE DIFFUSION and other local programs do not censor like
Midjourney does. So I can upload and alter my figure drawings to the programs installed on a "local" computer.
AI UGLY
IS MORE INTERESTING
One of the big problems with AI ART is that all the commercial programs try to shoehorn the results into some kind of flawless Barbie archetype:
The ideal AI ART image,
which all the commercial programs are aiming for
Midjourney is currently polling for "THE MORE BEAUTIFUL" images in order to tune it's new upcoming model, in order to please everyone:
"Select the one that you think is more beautiful..."
The "more beautiful" aim just generates the same thing all the time. Maybe the antidote is to generate UGLY AI ART on purpose, which might be "more interesting." I can easily generate ugly using an
AI model based on my figure drawings:
Pretty ugly result -- but interesting,
generated by an AI model based on my figure drawings
I even made an UGLY model in Midjourney, by uploading a lot the ugly figures I generated in
STABLE DIFFUSION, like the one above, to create a
MOODBOARD:
--profile r34atn6
I can "
BLEND" ugly images in Midjourney, and even use the UGLY MOODBOARD, but the results still tend to be too conventional and usually too pretty:
Not so pretty, but not so interesting either --
UGLY
.png)
