Scary Stuff
I have been following and using the growing wave of AI apps and services for quite some time. There is still a lot of hype, but the sophistication level has reached an all-time high.
I recently made a series of images in my classic painterly style, and I was thrilled when I saw my style being interpreted by one of the most sophisticated GAN services.
Beyond Darkness came from a challenge by @ebysslabs and @illustrata_ai for the scariest art to be used in the #halloweenhaunt2022. Fright, scary, spooky, and horror are not themes I consider in creating my art style. But I thought this would be an ideal opportunity to learn how to infuse these emotions into a story using AI services.
Testing AI Services
I created a prompt and tried it on Playform.io, Dall-E2, Disco Diffusion, and MidJourney to see which service would make the best science fiction interpretation of these emotions. Each service gave back some interesting results:
- Playform was able to capture the spirit of the scary emotions —but struggled with capturing the science fiction theme in my style.
- Dall-E2 did the opposite: it captured my style perfectly but missed some of the emotional triggers.
- Disco Diffusion had some exciting variations none seemed scary enough.
BUT
- MidJourney created an imaginative story that brought horror and science fiction together that became Beyond Darkness.
All of the artwork generated by these services is impressive in its own right, with memorable landscapes and characters. In that regard, I only used a segment of the results as part of my Beyond Darkness series. I imagine this concept has potential even beyond my mind’s eye. The style of Beyond Darkness is primarily a good candidate for more horror scenarios rather than sci-fi.
It’s a new age of creativity with AI, and many possibilities exist for how we can use this technology to inspire our creativity. The future depends on creators using AI, so I’m excited to see where this will lead us.
Beyond Darkness
Each of the images in Beyond Darkness comes with a story that stands on its own. And if each image is collected, the entire story is told. Beyond Darkness, a graphic novel, is available on Objkt.
About Tery
Tery Spataro is a creator, science fiction author, enthusiast, futurist, and innovator. Her digital art extends both digital and physical realms—with some creations combining the two—and infuses the human condition with natural and technological elements to create kaleidoscopic experiences. Tery creates using AI-trained art applications and traditional digital tools; her portfolio showcases digital art and fine arts creations, surface design products, fashions, and several books she illustrated and wrote. Click here to learn more about Tery.
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