I use generative AI often, perhaps daily. I spend most of my attention on textual application, but I use image generations, too—with less than spectacular results. Many of the cover images for the articles I post here are Dall-E renders. Typically, I feed it an article and ask for an apt image. As you can see, results vary and they are rarely stellar because I don’t want to spend time getting them right. Close enough for the government, as they say.

Midjourney produces much better results, but you need to tell it exactly what you want. I can’t simply upload a story and prompt it to figure it out. I’ve been playing with Midjourney for a few hours recently, and I decided to share my horror stories. Although it has rendered some awesome artwork, I want to focus on the other side of the spectrum. Some of this is not safe for work (NSFW), and some isn’t safe for reality more generally. I started with a pirate motif, moved to cowgirls, Samuris and Ninjas, Angels and Demons, and I’m not sure quite what else, but I ended up with Centaurs and Satyrs – or did I?

It seems that Midjourney (at least as of version 6.1) doesn’t know much about centaurs and satyrs, but what it does know is rather revealing. This was my first pass:

Notice, there’s not a centaur in sight, so I slowly trimmed my prompt down. I tried again. I wanted a female centaur, so I kept going.

So, not yet. It even slipped in a male’s face. Clearly, not vibing. Let’s continue.

Trimming a bit further, it seems to understand that centaurs have a connexion to horses. Unfortunately, it understands the classes of humans and horses, but it needs to merge them just so. Let’s keep going. This time, I only entered the word ‘centaur’. Can’t get any easier.

It seems I got an angel riding a horse or a woman riding a pegasus. You decide. A bull – a bit off the mark,. A woman riding a horse with either a horn or a big ear. And somewhat of a statue of a horse. Not great. And I wanted a ‘female centaur’, so let’s try this combination.

Yeah, not so much. I’m not sure what that woman holding bows in each hand is. There’s some type of unicorn or duocorn. I don’t know. Interesting, but off-topic. Another odd unicorn-horse thing. And a statue of a woman riding a horse.

Satyrs

Let’s try satyrs. Surely Midjourney’s just having an off day. On the upside, it seems to be more familiar with these goat hybrids, but not exactly.

What the hell was its training data? Let’s try again.

Not so much. We have a woman dancing with Baphomet or some such. Um, again?

We don’t seem to be going in the right direction. I’m not sure what’s happening. Forging ahead…

On the plus side, I’m starting to see goats.

There’s even a goat lady montage thing that’s cool in its own right, but not exactly what I ordered. Let’s get back to basic with a single-word prompt: Satyr.

Well, -ish. I forgot to prompt for a female satyr.

Ya, well. This is as good as we’re getting. Let’s call it a day, and see how the more humanoid creatures render.