I have been feeding phrases from my current research for an essay – which explores our relationship with AI – into an AI illustrator. Midjourney launched recently and I thank my sometimes collaborator Simon Gwynne for alerting me to this and also DallE-Mini. I love seeing what it generates in seconds. Perhaps it’s even better when other users of the platform pick up on my prompts and generate alternatives. It’s a truly networked way of dabbling with images. Here are some that were prompted by a phrase from a book about Jaques Lacan – “an object without essence or signification” in a chapter about anxiety, vampires and breastfeeding. I am not getting very far with a second reading of a passage I think will be useful and important to my research because I keep stopping to ask the AI to see what it can make of the words.
Images made on Midjourney
I have not known what to make of these, although may well include them in my essay when I hand it in later this year. However, I was encouraged to see AI researcher Joanna Zylinska, whose writing I have cited in previous essays, using another AI image generator to create a composite, although her overall title is a little disparaging – Loser Images! Are these loser images? My essay looks at some of the anxieties we have around AI – for instance, will it make us all redundant? In which case, perhaps we, rather than the pictures, are the loser images…
Copjec, J. (2015) Read my desire: Lacan against the historicists. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press (Radical thinkers).