Not to be too carried away with AI image creation – whose power at mimicking continues to astonish – but it’s like I’ve discovered a new toy. Late to the party, as usual, but so what?

The other day I figured, what better than Victorian-style landscape painting to render an image of a cemetery whose founding and inspiration was Victorian? Of course, you can argue that “Victorian” is too nebulous to mean much, but this is AI we’re talking about. Its entire realm is nebulous – and yet also a dive into a vast body of images somehow or another associated with “Victorian,” thus spinning out something new in some old style.

That’s a long-winded way to say that I gave AI treatment to some images I took a couple of weeks ago at a major Chicago-area cemetery, more about which later. The first image hadn’t impressed me particularly, but I wanted to see what the image grinder could make it into.

Prompt: “Victorian-style landscape painting”

Original.

AI made a reasonable choice when it came to shifting the light around the image. I didn’t ask it to keep the lighting the same or similar, but even if I had, it might have ignored those instructions, as it does.

As I said, a new toy.

Prompt: “Escher-style”

Original – a sundial as a headstone. I don’t know that I’d seen that before, but it fits. As the surfers say, Tempus fugit, dude.

Prompt: “Socialist realism style.”

Original.

With the information marvels at hand, it didn’t take long to figure out “Workers of the World, Unite.” It looked familiar anyway. I regenerated the image a few times, and the slogan came back again and again. Also, the system persistently associated socialist realism with workers’ overalls. Guess there are good reasons for that.