Ishtar, Courtesy of AI.

As I complete the pilot for my TV script, which is projected for an Animated series, fellow students and alumni from my screenwriting classes have been eager to see character designs for the cast of the series.

I think they have concluded that I, myself, am an artist. Technically that is true.  I went through four years of art classes at one of the most competitive high schools in the field.  I also went on to study film in college.  In graduate school, among the many things I studied was what was at the time called “electronic graphics.”  Today, it is commonly referred to as CGI.

The sad fact is:  I have been out of practice with sketching, painting, illustrating, and animating for several decades - never mind years.  My artistic skills have atrophied rather than evolved.

However, one could argue I have found salvation in the form of AI image generators.  It has been seen by trained artists as a threat to their profession, which is a concern I do take seriously.  Very often, fine artists and commercial artists have pointed out that in various AI compositions, their own work has been plagiarized in the form of being composited in a Frankensteinian fashion to a finished AI product.

Nonetheless, I feel the need to compensate for my withering branch of talent with a technology that provides made-to-order works of art, hence the image posted above using the prompt “Cartoon rendering of the Goddess Ishtar holding an apple as she reclines on a teacher’s desk in a high school classroom.”

This finished work above was generated courtesy of an AI site called DALL-E, the name of said site no doubt being a pun of Salvador Dalí’s last name.

I was introduced to this site by a friend who used it to generate a humorous yet disturbing image for my personal entertainment.  The image below was created with the prompt, “The Twin Towers wear top hats and red bow ties as they tap dance and sing ‘Cheer up, John Baker, this was all just a nightmare!’”

I was intrigued by this.  I “commissioned” my friend to use DALL-E to generate an image similar to the cartoon Ishtar above using a pastel color effect.  The result was ghoulish to say the least.

That said, I will use the topmost image above as the basis, if not the end result, of my Ishtar character design.

To end this blog entry, I will present an image commissioned by my friend to DALL-E of a man being electrocuted in his bathtub while listening to an audio lecture by his professor on an antique playback machine.

Comical, yet eerie, no?

- JJB