Person : An ai diary Project overview

In June 2023, MidJourney was a best in class ‘text to visual’ AI tool was a year old and in its v5.2 release. A lot of the conversation around AI images touched themes that were familiar from an earlier part of my career as DSLR cameras, Adobe’s Photoshop and the digital darkroom became legitimate rivals to film. 

I started researching the implications of copyright and how data sets were sourced for the original training foundations of MidJourney’s (and its peers) models. I prompted with whatever mundane or weird thing that came to mind : self portraits, images of people at work, people playing polo in outer space. Sure there were the infamous “sausage fingers”, non-sequiturs and the down right surreal but overall the results were robust. The tool responded to different genres; very specific camera settings and artistic style references. It needed to be steered directly “less cleavage” to overcome stereotypical responses but results were compelling and fun.

By July 2023, I had started using whatever I’d done that day as inspiration for daily prompt in MidJourney as a form of learning and play. On the day I had a doctors appointment, I prompted MidJourney with these fateful words: “Woman gets a mammogram”.

The results were stupefying.

     Pepto Pink. MidMod everything.

     Women smiling & opening gifts from their always male doctors

     Women in pink ballgowns, literal party dresses.

     So hilariously & disturbingly wrong.

Instead of a Ghost in the Machine, it gave me the Tech-Bro in the Machine.  

As strangely Lovecraftian comedic as Peek-A-Boo Man is, in conjunction with a tendency to produce female characters generally as buxom sexualized stereotypes, it illustrated the implicit bias embedded in a technology trained on biased, narrow material with teams that likely also lacked diversity. 

I wanted to influence a different direction.