Faces

As you all know, I spend a lot of time on the website DA, DeviantArt.  This is a website for artists of all sorts, on which they can put up (upload) their art.  There are also non-artists who are members.  When you check in ón any day, you are shown a sequence of images, which are what the artists have been uploading.  If you click on any of the the images, you are taken to the page of that image, containing (1) information that the creator of it volunteered about the image, (2) any comments that other members wrote on that page, (3) links to similar images by the same person, and (4) owner (artist) information.

All the written comments, including the name of the piece, are sometimes difficult to decipher, if the creator is not a speaker (or writer) of English.  For example, pivotal words, such as 'elf' is written 'elve'.  Sometimes you read 'Occidental Elve', by which I have understood a plain ol' white-skinned elf, in contrast to a dark- skinned one, or one with, say, Chinese features.  Added to all this is the problem of discovering which fandom the character represented belongs to.  For instance, if the universe is some sort of deep space one, it could be from the Star Trek fandom, or the Star Wars fandom, or other worlds of which I am totally unaware. 

Now since AI tools have been introduced, the entire website seems to have been taken over by sort of pseudo-programmers, who must only communicate to the AI software just what he (or she—many of the artists are female) want the software to do.   Starting with the base image that the software is handed, there are a number of transformations it can perform; I don't know what all they are.  (My friend Petra has repeatedly offered to show me how AI art works, but I haven't yet taken her up on the offer.)

I am convinced, though, that the original base image has a huge influence on the final result.  I say this because some of the faces I see on the girls are so amazingly expressive.  I sometimes see a face with an expression so startlingly emotionally expressive, that I want to write a whole story centered around that girl!  If the artist (or AI jockey) could create that face, with that expression, from scratch, then he/she wouldn't need AI!

Kay