darkemeralds

Wombo

My pal Xina introduced me to one of those phone apps that's probably evil and collecting data on me and destroying culture as we know it, or whatever, but is just so damn cool, called Wombo.

Wombo is an AI that creates art in one of about twenty styles ("Baroque," "Etching," "Fantasy Art," "Steampunk"...). You put in some keywords, choose a style, and let it rip for a few seconds. Next thing you know, it generates art.

The novel I'm trying to work on, set in the early 1900s in Portland, includes an actual historical event where the working girls from the brothel down in Old Town rode their bikes through the respectable part of downtown, past City Hall, in their scanties, ringing their bells, to drum up business.

So I put "1905 Bike Prostitutes*" into Wombo and selected the "Pastel" style...and behold!

*Yes, "sex workers" would be more correct, except, you know, 1905.

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My exSO sent me a link to that - it's so weird but also fun!
I like the sort of melted qualities of the bikes, heh.

What's fun--if you're into some fairly harmless time-wasting--is to use the same keywords over and over while selecting the different styles. I had one set of keywords involving "gentlemen" and every style, including the Japanese one, delivered a vague sense of figures wearing black with white collars and cuffs.

So you can sort of guess at how the AI "thinks." I imagine stuff like this will continue to get better and better.

Interesting!
I keep putting in 'horse' or 'horses' and wow, nightmare fuel. But I love it.

I know, right? I put in "horses" because my current WIP involves a groom and a footman, and I wanted a kind of insirational book cover image, and whoa. Horrible! But interesting.