Adventures in AI - Part Three

In this edition, I set AI (ChatGPT) to work on visualising aspects of my Mr Slowly stories from Short Horror Tales. So far there are four of these stories: Kill Him, Slowly; Kill The President, Slowly; Slowly, Under Siege; and the soon-to-be-released Hunting Slowly (out at the end of this week!).

First, I uploaded descriptions of Slowly and his handler/partner Pearl from the books...

I was so surprised by the first set of images, I asked for a second, which were equally as good. Slowly looks tough, dangerous and weathered by action, and AI’s Pearl captures her personal strength and unusual appearance. This was good... so I thought I’d ask for more challenging images...

Slowly and Pearl side-by-side in the middle of a battle?

Great. Surrounded and outnumbered as usual.

Okay, what about them fighting again... But with a big explosion behind the pair, hurling enemies through the air? At this, AI said ‘No’, since it might violate its violence rules. Fair enough, I deleted all reference to flying bodies and got...

Mm! Now I can have the flying bodies – which do look awesome, I admit. I don’t get why AI refused this first and then did it later. Who cares, this was great fun!

And I started to get carried away...

Slowly fighting a vampire hand-to-hand, fending off its wide fang-filled mouth. Oops! AI didn’t like the sound of that, could be violent. I removed the reference to fangs and got—

Yeah, AI did it again. Gave me what I first wanted, after forcing me to backtrack and alter my request. And those are some nice fangs. Plus, AI decided a little blood was OK – all by itself. A truly nice action pic! On top of enjoying the results, I loved that I got the same Mr Slowly each time, ChatGPT didn’t change his appearance for every image – surprising and cool.

Let’s have Slowly bursting through a window, firing as he goes.

How about going him backwards through a window, firing at the creatures inside?

Nice image, but sadly that fall would kill my character or at least break an awful lot of bones. My bad, perhaps, I didn’t specify he wasn’t ‘falling to his death’.

I’ll admit, I was kinda giddy as a kid on a sugar rush at this point. These were all good images and brought my characters to life well.

Oooh: what about Slowly dangling off a rooftop, high above a street?

The perspective on this one is great. He really looks high up, the cars are like toys below. And, as requested, AI gave slowly a good facial expression (again) to display his struggle.

All right, last one. I decided to recreate the atmosphere of a scene from Slowly, Under Siege. Slowly and Pearl, in a ruined house, firing at a creature about to come through a doorway. What could go wrong..?

Ah! What could go wrong? Well, why are the characters looking back over their shoulders rather than focussing on the target? It just seems silly. And maybe it explains why they can’t hit their enemy at such a short range.

However, that’s one image out of all of them that I didn’t like – AI knocked it out of the park this time. The results also made me think: an author (or a movie director) could use these kind of images to create highly detailed storyboards when planning out a scene. I do storyboard sometimes (but I can’t draw, so it’s stick-figures, scribbled notes and a lot of imagination!) and it can help me to develop ideas. Personally, I’ll stick to what works for me... but for some of the newer generation of writers, maybe this would become part of their planning process?

On the other hand, when I did these Mr Slowly images, I gave AI a lot of descriptive guidance – down to facial expressions, who was on the left or right, and so on. And if you already had all the descriptive stuff ready... why not put it straight into a manuscript?

Writing systems all come down to what works for the individual. Stephen King does zero planning, for example, he just writes. AI images could be a useful tool for writers. I just hope these wordslingers don’t become overly reliant on AI, and surrender any of their craft to The Machine. After all, it’s human imagination and our understanding of emotion, character and so on, that lead to great stories.

For my fourth delve into AI imagery, I decided to stay with Mr Slowly and ask it to create images from the new story Hunting Slowly. I pushed the difficulty level up for AI, and I think I gave it a headache. You’ll see the results soon!

To finish, here are the actual covers from the four Slowly stories: