My AI muse Misky, recently made a post entitled Barglefloop and I quote her “barglefloop, means to mess with words in your AI prompt in order to confuse it, to turn nouns into verbs, to make single words compound, etc.” It occurred to me to experiment by adding the same prompt to Midjourney as Misky had used and see if the AI came back with the same images as she got – it did not! Here are the first four I got using the prompt “Barglefloop“
Where Misky’s images tended towards Hieronymous Bosch – mine were Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings Rivertown. Below is the fourth image enlarged to show the level of detail the AI has put in…
But what does this tell us about the way Midjourney works – that Barglefloop is nonsense and so the AI creates whatever it wants to – let off the leash so to speak? I decided to add some more nonsense “barglefloop female foxing blithy toves” – Foxing – as a noun gone verb, and “slithy toves” from Lewis Carrol’s Jabberwocky (’twas brillig and the slithy toves…). This time the AI seized on the only bit of the prompt that made sense Fox and gave me four fox pictures, ignoring the rest of the senseless prompt – so Midjourney, whilst known to hallucinate as much as the next AI was not so desperate to act freely – released by nonsense…
Cute but no cigar for Midjourney so now I went for all the nonsense, none of the foxing around “barglefloop blithy toves” and now we get something quite nightmarish in a Snarky/Jabberwocky Carrollian sort of way, with perhaps a hint of Bosch…
So lastly I decided to miss out the Barglefloop and just retain the Lewis Carrol words “twas brillig and the blithy toves” and now we can see an Alice in Wonderland flavour to the images – particularly the top two…
Lastly, I asked for variations on the bottom right image – a rather mad-looking figure with a slightly Victorian flavour…
Does this tell us much about the way the “mind” of an AI works – I will let you be the judge – and stay away from hookah-smoking caterpillars seated on toadstools – my advice…
Really interesting. I like the first image; the foxes are long-legged but nevertheless pretty; the next one is too scary but I’m sure there are users on MJ who’ll love it; Alice U2 I like a lot; the last one U4 looks like Dali.
This is a brilliant experiment, which proves to me that AI still needs guidance or it goes a bit mental.
Please check your email. 😀
fascinating!
The rest of the reports on AI are on the page https://how-would-you-know.com/exploring-ai – it has been an interesting exploration, David…