Retirement Planning Update

As regular readers know, my plan is to turn over the creation of this site, the monthly newsletter and the books to artificial intelligence as soon as possible.

So far the writing output produced by AI has been… less than impressive. The “tricks” it comes up with are steaming hot garbage. And the way it describes the tricks reads like shit.

AI art, on the other hand, seems to be significantly far ahead of AI writing.

Which has me thinking that perhaps I can ditch my long-time friend and creative collaborator, Stasia, who has illustrated all my books, and replace her with an AI robot artist.

Here are my initial tests.

I wanted to start out simple and see how AI would replicate this image from my third book.

I simplified it by just asking for an image of two hands holding a sheet of paper with 6 Post-Its on it.

I got this.

Okay, that’s literally the wrong number of hands and Post-Its. But it’s at least somewhat recognizable as hands and things that could be post-its. So I’ll consider that a win.

Next I tried to see if I could replicate this image from my second book. Here’s the original photo and Stasia’s illustration.

I asked AI for an image from behind of a girl holding a playing card in her outstretched hand. I got this.

I guess the concept of “outstretched” hasn’t reached the AI consciousness yet. And I’m pretty sure this girl has six fingers. Why are the fingers so often messed up in AI art? And why couldn’t they get the number of hands I asked for in the previous image correct? Getting the number of things correct seems like it would be the easiest part of an AI generated image.

Wait, I want to test something. I’m going to ask for an image of a guy with 8 fingers on his right hand. Let’s see what they give me.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON??? Why can’t it handle this simple request? AI can generate the most surreal images, but not this? I don’t understand it.

Sadly, I just don’t think the AI does a great job at depicting what I’m trying to illustrate. Like, what do you think were the prompts that generated these images…

If you said, “a playing card sticking out of a toilet tank,” “a snowball with a D’lite stuck in it,” and “a tampon with a $5 bill wrapped around it.” You’d be right. You’d also be lying because there’s no way you thought that.

These concepts were all easily understood by my human artist.

So, sadly, it looks like I’m going to have to stick with a real human for the time being.

I guess we’re still some ways away from making this site and the various publications completely self-sustaining via AI. I’m hoping to turn everything over to the computers by next March (I want to have nothing on my plate so I can watch the NCAA tournament uninterrupted. Fingers crossed!)

Just to test one final thing, I asked the AI to generate a portrait of “Andy the writer of the Jerx blog.”

And it gave me this…

So flattering!!!