Generating The Rarest of Pepes with AI
Midjourney
Lately I have been toying around with Midjourney a lot.
It is one of the most popular text-to-image translation AI platforms out to date.
While I failed to muster up actual use cases of this technology to help me with my work,
I had a lot of fun trying out different prompts and figuring out AI's limitations.
It didn't take me long to realize that it's impossible to generate images of public figures.
At the very least they are trying their hardest to prevent us all from doing so. As they rightfully should!
It is quite difficult to generate nsfw content as well. This includes nudity, gore-like material and the rest.
I haven't really given much thought into "prompt hacking", however other people have passed by Midjourney's filters with varying levels of success.
(Do not attempt to prompt "Saturn devouring his son". You have been warned.)
I ended up spending most of my time mixing different motives in the style of famous Polish painter Zdzisław Beksiński. He passed away in 2005, so I doubt that he will mind if we borrow his designs to produce a couple of AI-generated artworks.
Friendship & Silliness
Around the first hour of playtesting I decided that I wanted to do something special for my remote friend.
This guy lives 2 hours drive away from me and while we keep in touch frequently we haven't met each other face to face for a long time.
One of the best perks about our friendship is that we share a common sense of humour, which is what has kept our daily interaction going throughout all these years.
Pepe the frog is a meme that we are both quite fond of.
There's this ongoing joke on the internet where people consider images of Pepe the frog as collectibles [1].
Hahaha, it's stupid I know, but that's what makes it funny.
To make a long story short, I've decided to make an image of two Pepe the frogs hugging each other while wearing red and blue hoodies.
Red, the tall frog being me and the shorter blue one is my friend.
Gosh, it took me a number of attempts to get our height proportions right.
For some reason Midjourney wanted to make the blue one taller. Sorry, I can't allow that.
And the effort I spent into getting the correct number of arms & fingers. My God!
Don't even get me started on the fingers! I digress. Here's the final picture.
Cool right? I shared this image with him and we had a couple of good laughs. But then I started wondering. I still had a couple of hours of credits to spend, so why not invest them into producing my very own rare Pepe collection.
Frog Kingdom and The Hunt for The Rarest of Pepes
I realized Zdzisław's style worked best when Pepe was put in a mediaeval theme, so I went with it.
I ended up burning all my credits on producing various different figures across the frog kingdom.
So without further ado, here's the final results.
The King
Queen in golden veil
Diplomat
Castle prophet
Street prophet
Alchemist
Dark wizard
Incantator (yes I know, it's a derivative of the Dark wizard)
Dark knight
Portal wizard
Embracia, tree of Limbwoods
Marksman
Spice trader 1
Spice trader 2
Spore farmer
Wisdom trader
Beggar
Brother knights
Of course, I couldn't show you the rarest ones that I have. In doing so, they would lose their value and I'm not the one to fall for the watermark trick. But I hope you still enjoyed the ones I decided to share. Remember to have fun, not to take life too seriously and don't forget to take care of your buddies.