Playing with MidJourney

The latest distraction fun thing I've discovered is the art-generating AI bot "MidJouney."  This has required that I also learn Discord, which I suppose isn't too bad a thing. 

I've been playing around with it over the weekend; the justification for doing so is that I can use it to generate covers for some short stories I've got lying around that I really should publish. 

Working with the AI is interesting.    I've managed to create a few images in the blended styles of  Edward Burne-Jones and William Holman Hunt.  I asked it to render tarot cards in the style of Pamela Coleman Smith, and what came out was interesting, but looked more like Crowley's Thoth Deck and a possible portrait of Ms. Smith.  

The AI doesn't appeared to have been trained on Middle Kingdom hieroglyphs, and I'm thinking that its renderings of the ancient Egyptian god Thoth may be pulling more from the Stargate Science Fiction franchise than actual ancient Egyptian images. I might have to try something specific like "man with an ibis head." (which is has led to depictions which are closer to either to Native American Raven or a medieval plague doctor).

I did a fine job with a flying machine over a medieval city.  It makes pleasing images of the moon and architecture, and I got some interesting portraits with the prompt "The Magician Tarot Card by Pamela Coleman Smith."  MidJourney does have a tendency to blend things together into one image unless one is specific—so far my attempts to have the Lord of the Animals and the Greenman dancing have resulted in a chthonic figure in the uncanny valley; "dung beetle hieroglyphs" resulted in images of a beetle with tiny pseudo hieroglyphs on its body.

There's some commands I can embed in the text that I tell MidJourney to build a picture from, and it looks like I'll have to play around with them some more.  

Er.  I mean.  I'll need to enter in some text from some of my stories and see if it comes up with some good cover art.  Yeah.