A Movie Fan’s AI Christmas Bonanza

Greetings, Glancers! Cold, innit? It is here, on the North Coast of the North of Ireland where the price of oil, coal, the bodies of slaughtered heathens, or whatever else you choose to burn to keep your home toasty, has been skyrocketing since silly Mr Putin decided to flick his microscopic shlong South without consent. Luckily, Christmas is around the corner and we’ll be briefly distracted from these and other woes as we partake in the grand old tradition of giving, and more importantly, receiving gifts. There will be booze, TV, and lots of sitting about not worrying about work. Tis truly the most wonderful time of the year.

Here is my gift to you; A sporadic collection of AI generated art featuring some of my favourite movie icons celebrating the birth of our Lord and Savior, Santa F’n Claus. I hope it brings you some festive cheer, and that you huddle around your smartphone or laptop with your loved ones to enjoy some lovely, memory-building laughs.

Darth Furder

Thumbs up – knobs out

Dr Nope

Shaken, stirred, and highly disturbed

Some Like It Hot

Merry Christmas, Mr President

Some Like It Not

Ho Ho No

Rockin Around The Zuul Tree

WAAAAY HAAAAAYYY!

Your Foster Parents Are Dead

Memetic Poly Alloy Ho Ho

I Know Now Why You Cry

Anyone not wearing 2 million sunblock is gonna have a real bad day, get it?

Dead or alive, you’re coming with me

COME QUIETY OF THERE WILL BEEEE… TROUBLE

Can you cry, Bobby?

If it sings, we can kill it

I’m gonna have me some fun

Sprouts

You’re a mean one, Mr Grinch

IT’S CHRIIIIIIISSSSSTMAAAAAAASSSS!

Have Yourself A Very Phallic Christmas

Meanwhile…

Just You…..And I….

So I Was Like… ‘sometimes my arms bend back’

So much as, you know, disembowel children

The hardest thing in this world, is to live in it. While looking like this.

That thing you do with your mouth that boys like

How sweet, fresh meat

Wanna suck face

Welcome to prime time, bitch!

O Holy Night, Batman

Pure…. West…

This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires

The Seven Days Of Christmas

Frolic in brine, goblins be thine

… and a Sadako in a pear tree

Merry Christmas!

Manic Street Preachers Album AI Artwork

Greetings, Glancers! I continue my romp through the laughter and boke-provoking world of AI creations. by passing a globby, pixelated eye over musical artwork. Album artwork is a glorious art form – one which doesn’t get enough credit from cravat wearing Art types. Probably. I didn’t bother checking. But a good piece of album artwork can tease the musical and thematic treats inside, like a goblin waving his codpiece while beckoning you into his candy covered hovel. Artists and bands spend weeks and months deciding upon what works and what doesn’t before slapping a big breasted leather clad woman straddling a tiger on the front and confidently nodding their heads – yes, that’s the one.

In this era of AI witchcraft, the artist has every right to shiver in the foreboding knowledge that they will soon be out of a job like the rest of us. Why spend thousands of dollars on a commission from some dick who dropped out of school with no qualifications and likely has a social media picture of them holding a cup of coffee and looking wistfully off to the left, when you can type a few prompts into an app and get something unique and nightmarish for free?

For this post, I typed the name of every studio album by Wales’ finest Rockers into one such app and have specially curated the results for your bemusement. From start to finish, may I present, The Manic Street Preachers – AI style.

The Manic Street Preachers have been around for so long now that they’re reliably labelled as Dad Rock by people who don’t know any better. After their run of hits towards the arse end of the 90s, and the fact that they’re no longer as energetic as they once were, it’s a term which easily fits when you can’t be arsed actually looking into the band. The AI bot has seemingly fallen for this trap too, with a collection of harmless dinner jacket clad images proclaiming ‘we sing songs and play guitar, but not too loudly’.

What’s interesting about the App is that a slight change in keywords can garner such different results. For example, when I remove the band name from the search we get something much closer to what the band were like in their younger days – angry, vitriolic, cross-dressing punk boys who would just as soon plant a bomb in your pants as rip them off with their teeth.

Sadly, the App became too confused when I kept the band name out and would return complete nonsense. For this sophomore album, the band embraced all thing riff and rock in the hope of capturing bigger audiences. It didn’t work, but it’s an excellent album with a flawless five tracks and a middling five. The App cares for none of this and instead latched on to the word GOLD.

The band’s third album is famously one of the greatest albums ever made, and certainly one of the darkest, most uncompromising pieces of art you’re likely to encounter. Its album artwork is a shocking glimpse into what’s inside. The AI bot gets some of the colouring right, and it at least attempts to nod its head towards the albums many, many literary influences and allusions, but it unfortunately makes the band look like if Keane was crossed with PJ & Duncan.

The band’s first success coincided with the loss of their heart, their lyricist Richey Edwards. Continuing as a 3 piece, everyone was shocked when they found themselves topping the charts and courting the Britpop obsessed music bothering public of the 90s. The bot seems confused if they are a 3 piece, a 4 piece, a duo, or just James with a dog’s nose.

Continuing with this trend of uncertainty and rather than adopting the new, bland visuals of the band once famed for their outlandish appearance, the AI bot presents the band as one of warped faces, splayed legs, and very long guitars.

The band’s clusterfuck moment – pissed off with being famous they elected to do whatever they could to alienate every part of their fanbase with 16 songs of fuzzy experimentalism. Curiously, this is the first time the app consistently gets close to actually looking like the band. It has also decided it’s a live album.

By the time Lifeblood came around, no-one cared anymore. The world had moved on to shitty angular indie rock like The Strokes and The Killers, and had no time for Welsh upstarts unsure of their musical direction. The band is a synthpop slice of cold abandonment, and it just as wonderful as everything else they’ve done. Shame no-one else thinks so. The App has gone with a blue sheen, which suspiciously apt.

With Send Away The Tigers, The Manics tried to recapture some of their old punk energy making an album of mostly uneventful and repetitive snappy songs. 80s punk and metal bands liked tigers. The App likes tigers.

Postcards From A Young Man was famously the band’s attempt at mass communication – they thought the best way to communicate was with an overly produced Motown album. What’s interesting about the bot’s cover is the approximation of both Richey, and of Sean Moore who deserves his own pic above. Not sure why he has an electronic bug blaster for his eye, but there you go.

Journal For Plague Lovers was a stonking return to form, even if the tracks feel a little unfinished. The bot has gone for some sort of Industrial-Black-Doom Metal thing with one picture looking like a mermaid drooping out of a moon.

Not sure why I got the order of the last two albums mixed up, but I’m not changing it now. Rewind The Film is the dullest of albums – it’s like the second half of This Is My Truth, played twice. But less good. iTs BeTteR WHen yOU’re OlD! Sure it is, boomer. This blandness has rubbed off on the bot, aside from placing Cristina Ricci front and centre.

Futurology is the much more interesting cousin of Rewind The Film, coming out less than a year later. Much like the album, the bot’s artwork is a mish-mash of ideas, from men in suits showing off their toy soldier collections between their feet, to James’ amazing Matt Bellamy inspired banana guitar.

 

Unfairly dismissed by idiots as uninteresting, Resistance Is Futile is a fantastic blend of the band’s most mainstream sentiments and their latter day experimentalism. It may not go hard in either direction, but it’s accessible as fuck. The bot believes that obese emo Thom Yorke is now a member and that Wales is a turgid wasteland.

The band’s most recent release saw them grab the number 1 spot in the UK charts. Of course, you only need to sell 300 copies to earn that coveted award, but it’s the principle of the thing. It’s not too different from Resistance Is Futile – there’s still too many special guests, the inspiration is now ABBA rather than Bowie, but even with its pop sensibilities it veers into progressive territory more frequently than they have before. I fully expect a Concept album next. The bot’s attempt at creating something unique fell on its arse.

Let us know in the comments what you think of any of this shite.

15 AI Images Of Famous Power Couples

Greetings, Glancers! Like every other twat, I’ve been farting about with these funny AI Apps to avoid real life responsibilities. Carlos, you haven’t called your mother in two months! Carlos, put yourself on mute if you’re not talking! Carlos, I told you to pay the mortgage! Carlos, I told you not to leave the baby in the car by herself! Carlos, I’m leaving you! It’s great.

I’ve always had a love/please stop doing this to me relationship with AI and merging tools. I’ve created hundreds of hilarious pictures where I’ve merged myself with friends, celebs etc, and in work I’ve inexplicably received positive feedback on my celebrity face merge quizzes where I use an actual online tool to do the job for me. There was a certain demented charm in my own creations because I set myself a rule of only using the worst possible tool to generate severely limited results – a combination of Microsoft Paint and Fast Stone Capture was all I used.

We’re in a much more technologically advanced world now, one where AI bots are able to predict our desires and tell us what we need to purchase before we even soil our pants and they need to be replaced. A world where human run jobs are steadily being taken over by cheap robot labour. A world where it will soon be unclear if the person you’re speaking to on the internet, or on the bus, is actually human or a mangled collection of ones and zeroes plotting the downfall of your species.

But until that inevitable eventuality, we shall treat these bots with misguided innocent delight for whimsical means rather than formulating an actionable doomsday response. So here are some amusing mixings of famous people, using the infamous Craiyon.com (formerly DALL.E mini).

JESUS SCHWARZENEGGER CHRIST

If you ever wanted a man to wash away your iniquities and ‘take you to heaven’ as long as you ‘believe in him’, then it’s this Herculean hunk of plasticine and tan.

THE ARTIST FORMERLY KNOWN AS PRINCE WILLIAM

Prince is the greatest guitarist of all time! No, Prince is the greatest musician of all time! No, Prince is neither of those things – he’s just some dead guy who was fine at writing songs which other artists performed better than he ever could. He’s also the unwanted offspring of that unlawful criminal hive of warmongering pedo-protectors known as The British Royal family. Here’s the shocking proof.

DAVID BOWIE KNIFE

Most of the attempts at generating these images ended up as pictures of knives with signatures beside them. By adding two extra words, we yield significantly more pleasing results.

JOHN KAREN CARPENTER

Soothing songstress Karen Carpenter may have died decades ago, but through the power of AI – THEY LIVE (get it?)!

MICHAEL DJ FOX

The app must not know who sort of famous UK DJ, DJ Fox is, and therefore generated a pile of muck instead. See:

Instead, if I simply search for Michael J Fox and DJ Fox, we are treated to starched skin Ant & Dec. Great Scott!

BEN & JERRY’S SHAPIRO

Famous racist Ben Shapiro probably hates these delicious yet over-priced tubs of frozen cream ever since they started introducing other flavours and diverse colours. VANILLA ONLY, ALL THE TIME! Such weak minded hatred only leads to a withered, monstrous visage like thus.

SIMON LE BON JOVI

Two of the 1980s biggest stars and sexy idols met once upon a time, in Rio I believe. They ‘fiddled’ each other, and out slithered the grotesque progeny of their regretful congress.

RANDY MICHAEL JACKSON

Whether or not Michael Jackson was ever Randy, and who with, is a subject people will talk about for the rest of time without ever coming to a definitive answer. He sure loved grabbing his crotch, though. The question of whether Randy Jackson was ever Michael, doesn’t really make sense. Neither does this picture.

WILL.I.AM SHAKESPEARE

What do you get when you cross one of history’s greatest writers with one of history’s worst dressers (I’ll let you work out which is which)? This, obvs.

STEPHEN KINGSLEY AMIS

No matter which choice of words I went for with this miserable combo, the result was always purely King or purely Amis. You may say something went ‘amis’ with the AI. If you were an idiot. Which you are.

SARAH MICHELLE ROSS GELLAR

A Buffy and Friends crossover would never have worked because Chandler and Xander are basically the same person. Buffy and Ross too, apparently. At least, the plan was to see what Ross and Buffy looked like with their bodies smooshed together in a non-sexy way, but the AI bot instead interpreted my wishes as ‘insert Buffy into Friends episodes’.

DEL BOY GEORGE

Most of you Americans reading this probably know who Boy George is – of Karma Chameleon fame. You maybe don’t know who Del Boy is, infamous geezer, father of The Antichrist and fan of luvvly jubbly money. Slapped into a single body and it’s neither, fools, horses, nor chameleons.

DAVID JANE LYNCH

There’s something comforting about listening to David Lynch’s meanderings – like the stories of a well-travelled uncle who always brings the best presents. Less comforting is the thought of his cavorting body writhing all up in the innards of ‘that women from Glee’. 

NEVE BRUCE CAMPBELL 

I tried Neve Campbell soup, but that just made me horny and I had to go away for a while. There are lots of famous Campbells out there, and none of the mergings were to my satisfaction (especially not after the soup relief), so in the end I went for old chinny legs himself, Bruce ‘Hail To The B-Movie’ Campbell. They make for a cute couple. IN HELL.

THOM YORKIE BAR

No matter what you search for, if you include Thom Yorke in the search, then the result is Thom Yorke as he normally looks. It seems reasonable to conclude therefore that Thom has been a bot since some point in the late 90s, steadily weaselling his nebulous limbs into every USB port and server farm he gets with a Terabyte of.

Who is your favourite A-List couple? Let us know in the comments, and be certain that I’ll have plenty more of these AI shit posts to come!