Poetry Postcard Fest Follow Up Post 2024 #15

Dear Melody

I felt. I felt it unencumbent on me
to explore AI. so I could see
what all the fuss was about.
I duly sought some pointers on the Internet
then jumped right in to experiment
and have to say – took to it like a duck to water!
To get the image just as you want it
clear instructions, you must formulate
when writing your Midjourney prompt,
even the order of instructions – best
before AI. goes off. and does the rest
But then again, keeping it simple
a single word – an abstract image
may deliver for your waiting. page
as in this image. – The prompt was
– Poetry…

Much Love
Andrew.

This last year, both I and many poets I know (in the Internet sense as opposed to the real world or the biblical), have started illustrating their work using AI images whose results are sometimes so stunning as to distract from the poems being illustrated. So are we shooting ourselves in the foot, gilding the lily…

The Poetry Postcard Fest is a challenge which encourages poets to write an unedited poem on a postcard and send it to a stranger. It is organised by the Cascadia Poetics Lab, which arranges the participants into lists of 31 + yourself for you to address your offerings to. This was my second year and I was on List 10. The lists are sent out in early July and you have until the end of August to send out your poetic missives – to date I have received 21 of 31 possibles and now that we are into September, it is allowable to share the cards and poems you sent.
Although the original poem is to be sent as written – crossings out, blots and all, I have typed them out for people who can’t read my writing and I am allowing myself to edit if I feel like it…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative AI Number Five – Barglefloop, Confusing the AI

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…