Friday came around fast this week. It seems like Monday was only yesterday. Growing up I remember my mother marvelling at how the older she got the faster time seemed to move. She'd always caution us to enjoy the speed at which time moved for us in our youth. "One day you'll realize you're 40 and wonder where the time went," she'd say. It really does fly, whether you're having fun or not. It's a bit unnerving, honestly, how it whizzes by. From a scientific perspective it makes sense. The older you get, the more your reference interval increases: when you're 5, each passing year is 1/5 of the time you've been alive. This is why waiting for Christmas to come always seemed to take ages. But when you're nearing 40, you've sped things up 8x. Jesus. Days start to feel like weeks.
I know this isn't the topic I promised yesterday. I'm supposed to be telling you about my graphic novel. A little detour is okay sometimes. Everyone should take a moment to appreciate what little time they have on this planet and try to cherish those moments spent with friends and family. In a roundabout sort of way, that's one thing the graphic novel talks about. What started as a piece of environmentalist propaganda has metamorphosized into a 90-something page piece of madness that I never intended it to become. I was letting the story narrate itself without forcing anything. It was one of the things I enjoyed most about it - how I was never commanding it. It had a life of its own. This is what caused the genre to bend into something resembling a post-dystopian dieselpunk sci-fi horror fantasy adventure...with zombies.
The reason it's even possible is because of a game-changing artificial intelligence service called Midjourney. In simple terms, it's like hiring an artist. You tell it what you want, and it tries to draw it. It has some significant limitations, and it really doesn't replace real artists who can draw anatomically correct, well-proportioned human bodies, complex scenes, situations involving more than one or two subjects, and things as essential as hands. Midjourney can't do any of those particularly well. I struggled for hours one day to try and get it to generate an image of a dead bee, for example. The tool is crude, but evolving rapidly. It is absolutely a technological breakthrough and if more people were paying attention, an entire industry would feel threatened. Not the art industry, but advertising, marketing and design. To me, this shift runs parallel to how computers and synthesisers in the 80's changed not only the sound of music forever, but also the way we think about music. This tool does the same. It democratises art by putting it into the hands of those who lack the draftsmanship to create content. Anyone with a decent sense of art direction, however, can now use this tool to do something creative. It's incredibly empowering.
For really simple things Midjourney (and other AI art services in general) works amazingly well. Asking it to draw a cat or a tree or a city skyline are a piece of cake. But getting reusable characters wearing the same set of clothing and hairstyle is much much more challenging / impossible. That's why the process has taken so long. I started this months ago and didn't realize it would be this time-consuming. Granted, I do it as a hobby and not as a full-time job. Sadly it's sat lifeless since mid-December until about now. Once I finally finish it, in who knows how many more months, I'll post a link to it here.
I'd tell you more about the story, but I'm out of time. There's also the pesky problem of figuring out how it's going to end. I'm committing a cardinal sin according to the great Alan Moore. He argues you should know exactly where a story begins and ends before you start writing it. Maybe if I had known that I wouldn't have started writing it in the first place. I'd have missed out on a lot of fun and learning.
I have a newfound appreciation for graphic novels as a result of this experiment. There are so many micro-decisions to make on each panel and each page that it can be maddening. As a reader I never thought about it before.
More about this and AI art tomorrow!
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