So, Bucolic Surrealism…

… of course, we love it…

… ones like the above, we usually keep re-iterating until she doesn’t have a mutant hand, but we just couldn’t be bothered! The over-all image is still wonderfully surreal, including her ugly hand…

… we love this strange, bucolic weirdness…

… as we’ve previously said, we could happily live in such a weird reality…

… perhaps that’s because we are a 4000 year old alien, stranded on Earth…

… and we’re just bored with the real.

Our output runs well in advance of our posting… we have to remember to post before we get too far ahead! In the one above you can see the beginnings of a style that we named ‘Bucolic Surrealism’; we eventually used an image like this and the only written prompt we gave was ‘bucolic surrealism’, and Mj was off and running with fabulous stuff, but we’ll save that for next post…

… we love these strange worlds, we could happily live in them…

… even in a dream…

… we love the strange, alt-past feel Mj applies so well. As we understand it, that’s because when they first exposed the algorithm to all the art on the net it could vacuum up, there was far more ‘old’ imagery that was either Creative Commons, or just totally un-shielded. Another thing we discovered, recently, is that Mj does astonishingly realistic cats! That must be because of the sheer volume of cat imagery on the net (:

We’ve run out of titles involving the concept of surreality, so thought we’d just use the date, which, in itself, will be slightly surreal to most of you, as we are posting from your future…

… the top one has a wonderful 70’s manipulated photo feel to it, while the above is just pure Mj weirdness…

… this one has a 70’s surreal collage feel…

… and this one, again, is pure Mj weirdness…

… and we feel this one is genuinely surreal, a combination of our diligent guiding and Mj weirdness (:

We love these…

… the gorgeous colours…

… the wonderful structures and shapes…

… and the beautiful trees…

… one of the things we appreciate most when creating surreal imagery with Mj, is that it comes up with compositions and content we would simply never have conceived of, even if it’s working from a seed image we gave it, what it does with those images is regularly genius. Many people say things like ‘AI will never replace ‘Art” (said in snooty, self-important voice)… but we think AI is creating it’s own ‘Art’, it’s not ‘replacing’ anything.

Our exploration into the strange and surreal imagery Mj can produce continues…

… we love this stuff!… each image is a strange story…

… or could easily illustrate a strange story…

… while many are wonderfully strange, many are also just surreal…

… we love the dream-like cohesion of the disparate elements in these ones…

… and the timelessness of the weirdness (:

When we (the human and I, not Flutter… she’s not much help when it comes to critical culling of our work, because she totally loves everything I do, equally, which is lovely, but, as I say, not helpful (: ) get to a stage, with Mj, where we are either unable to continue an iterative thread, or it just stays the same, and stops evolving, we deliberately throw out random prompts that we think might dramatically change things up. We tried ‘surreal polaroid’, and got the above…

… from there, we were away, again!…

… Mj hadn’t given us the result we envisaged, but we were totally happy with the images we were getting…

… from there, it was just a matter of changing the prompts, but keeping ‘surreal’ in there, somewhere…

… although we even dropped that, sometimes, but substituted it for words describing non-standard reality…

… Mj does wonderful surrealism, I suspect because it actually has no idea what it’s doing, no idea what ‘reality’ even looks like, so it has zero problems creating strange reality…

… in fact, you have to keep it within your chosen parameters, otherwise it starts creating absolute visual garbage, insanely cluttered images that resemble little more than an explosion in a junk shop…

… but, if you can keep the weirdness under control, you get beautifully surreal imagery.