Since I gave generative AI a whirl in creating text last week, it seemed only reasonable that I give one of the image-oriented generative AI sites a try too. First I consulted its FAQ page about copyright. The verbiage is weaselly indeed, but since this is such a new frontier in copyright, I suppose that can’t be helped. It said:

AI-generated images may not be subject to copyright protection in some jurisdictions.

You will have the rights to sell the images and use them privately or commercially (provided that they do not include any third-party content that is protected by copyrights or trademarks), but you might not have the exclusive right to use them and to exclude others from doing so. For more information about your specific rights, we advise you to contact a local counsel.

What local counsel would know? Anyway, with that in mind, my prompt was a bit of nonsense that I dreamed up in college, not anything borrowed from anyone else. How did I come up with it? After 40+ years, that eludes me. No matter.

Playing shot glass checkers at a bowling alley while watching [an old horror movie] on big-screen TV.

The original phrasing actually included the title of a well-known mid-century B&W movie, but to be absolutely sure I’m not stepping on any copyright, I’m omitting it here. Considering the images the AI made, it would be impossible to guess the title, unless there’s something I’m missing.

Anyway, the AI brain spit out three images, which are posted here unretouched.

Underwhelming, I’d say, but give the brain time. The faces are especially bizarre. Still inhabitants of uncanny valley, looks like.

Then I pulled another bit of nonsense from my past – a little after college, I think – but I don’t remember the context. The phrase stuck with me, though.

Death is like stepping off the orange.

So I fed that into the AI. With a little adjustment, the first one could be an album cover.

Again, give it time. What we really need, though, is an AI 3D printer that will make anything and everything. A replicator. Talk about disruption.

Arthur C. Clarke posited such a machine in his book Profiles of the Future, as I recall. Once you made the first one, you could have a limitless supply of them, as they replicated themselves. As he says in this 1964 clip, such a machine would sink the world into “gluttonous barbarism,” though he also notes that human beings are “almost infinitely adaptable.”

Interesting that he used the term replicator. Just another thing that Star Trek borrowed, unless it was a coincidental naming.