Floating in latent space with Taylor Swift

What do the new AI models mean for society?

Bill Tribble
UX Collective
Published in
4 min readNov 7, 2022
AI generated image of Taylor Swift in a renaissance landscape wearing a period dress

A friend sent me this image. I thought — well, I wonder if I could do better?

“Yeah, the artists are borked”

Ugly attempt at Taylor Swift by Craiyon
Taylor Swift by Craiyon

How it looks

I’ve been playing with these generative AIs (large language models, or LLM’s) for a while. Could one of the latest models, ‘Stable Diffusion’ could do any better? I refine the prompt: “Taylor swift, renaissance painting, extremely detailed, accurate proportions, realistic face, beautiful eyes, smiling, detailed lips, accurate lips, accurate chin”

Renaissance Taylor Swift (but more of a cartoon face really). Still — can’t beat the price!
Renaissance Taylor Swift (but more of a cartoon face really). Still — can’t beat the price!

Well yeah, I guess it could. Could we get a bit more specific, like playing the mandolin? Kinda.

Renaissance Taylor Swift playing something that’s not quite a mandolin or a guitar
Renaissance Taylor Swift playing something that’s not quite a mandolin or a guitar

Taylor Swift in a traffic cone hat?

How about riding a tiger, wearing a traffic cone? I tried several of these but it didn’t do well. This was my favourite weird combo. A tiger print traffic cone?

Tiger Swift wearing a tigerprint cone hat
Tiger Swift not riding a tiger. Taylor. No, a traffic cone hat!

After refining the prompt a bit I finally got these.

At last the traffic cone! Devo at all?

How it feels

It’s a surreal experience. Yes, the results are mundane. I could have created something similar using Photoshop. But the experience is totally different. There’s a feeling of jamming, going back and forth with something that almost feels intelligent. But more than this I get a feeling of weightlessness, of floating in the unknown. It’s diving into black water. It’s rolling the dice in the dark.

Renaissance Taylor Swift
Renaissance Taylor Swift

The future is here

Playing with these models, I’m reminded of William Gibson’s:

“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.

I feel like I’m floating, weightless, while the rest of the world remains firmly attached to gravity. It’s a feeling of limitless, strange power and potential. The closest analogy I have is when I first saw the internet working, as a student at Sussex University nearly 30 years ago. I had my mind completely blown when I saw that I could find almost anything, for free. Text and images would download from a server — anywhere in the world, anyone could put up a web page and I could see it, here in this small computer lab in South England. The first thing I started looking for were aliens of course, being a Fortean Times haunted teenager. In the Mosaic browser on a huge Unix machine, an image of a ‘grey alien’ scanned slowly into view, line by line of data emerging from who knew where to form a picture.

Taylor Swift cyberpunk cliche
Taylor Swift cyberpunk cliche

This changes everything

My first thought was: The internet changes everything. This changes all new media, everything about the future, and how we communicate and share. The horrible old big-money controlled media will disappear, and this will take over everything. I was right about everything changing, but totally wrong about the political implications. Peer-to-peer media turned out to be a hellzone when mediated by private companies looking to turn a profit. The Daily Mail is now the biggest news site in the world. But the change coming was real.

Taylor Swift wearing an orange road safety jacket
Getting the road vibes, but totally missing the traffic cone hat

Where are we headed?

I might be completely mis-led, but this is how I feel about the new LLM’s. I don’t know how, but they will change everything. Images now, but soon: Music, animation, video, 3D, VR.

We’re creating models of intelligent processes that will enhance, empower, transform, and perhaps replace vast swathes of human cognition and work. I have no idea how this will pan out. I hope that it will empower and enrich humanity, and enable us to solve our collective crises. My fear is that it will mostly fund a few super yachts for rich white men, while impoverishing the rest of us. The political and collective choices we make over the next decade will decide.

Two Taylor Swifts with extra limbs in a messy Renaissance painting
What would Renaissance Taylor Swift do?

Try this at home

If you want to have a play yourself, check out these links:

Craiyon — for fun and scrappy creative results

Dreamstudio — ‘Stable Diffusion’s key site and the source of all the images in this article

Midjourney — remarkable (if pricey) image generation through a Discord bot. You’ll need a Discord account to try it.

AI generative tools — an amazing resource if you want to go deeper.

Originally published at https://btribble.com on November 7, 2022.

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Bill Tribble

Digital product designer. Musician, design teacher, and mentor. https://btribble.com. Mindfulness podcast: https://awake-in.com.

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