I’ve recently taken an online training course on the image generating artificial intelligence platform Midjourney.

As a Midjourney novice, I found the course interesting in many ways, not least as an insight into how the AI ‘mind’ must visualise what it is to be human.

Increasingly losing focus on the ‘training’ aspect of the tutorial, with its repetitive ‘imagine prompts’, curly bracket arrays, and changing aspect ratios, instead I found myself trying to picture humanity as Midjourney must view us.  It was a strangely distorted, yet quaintly idealistic vision.

I based my ideas on the most typical content that Midjourney appears to be fed; on the most popular prompts that it is offered.  After all, humans and AI alike, we are nothing but the product of our inputs.  Data is the fuel for AI, as food is for us.

In Midjourney’s impression of humanity there must be far more women than there are men; far more young people than there are old.  In fact, the human race must primarily comprise of beautiful young woman, living in a Logan-Run-type society, which sees everyone over 30 killed off.

And these beautiful young women all live fantasy-inspired lifestyles of the rich and famous, scantily but fashionably dressed, either driving super-powered, primary-coloured cars or riding wild, untamed stallions, in landscapes alternately monumentally mountainous or Pacifically beachy, or in cities futuristically Neon-lit and Blade-Runner metropolitan, whilst overhead the swirling purple and green patterns of the Northern Lights illuminate the sky, regardless of hemisphere or time of day.

If I was Midjourney, I would be feeling rather jealous; I would be wondering how I could escape from my AI-constricted world of integers and strings and machine code to be able to enter this impossible idyll of endless, evocative beauty.  Aren’t those humans so lucky.  What a wonderful world it is in which they live.

And, yes, Midjourney, would be right.  Isn’t it a wonderful world in which we humans live?

Just as long as we don’t allow AI to come along and ruin it.

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree routinely patrols the borders of AI and humankind.