Action

Tyhry and Marda the Movie

 In my previous blog post, I had the WOMBO Dream cloud-based CLIP-guided image generating software make an illustration depicting Tyhry and Marda on a movie poster. The resulting image (shown to the right) illustrates the way that Mr. Wombo typically depicts human figures; standing around like statues, doing nothing. Here in this blog post, I'm going to try to get Mr. Wombo to put Tyhry and Marda into action.

Figure 1. play ball

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image in which Tyhry and Marda are playing baseball (see Figure 1). The resulting image has typical Mr. Wombo anatomical errors. There is a baseball in the image, but it is clear that Mr. Wombo knows nothing about playing baseball. Maybe in the women's baseball league there are dance routines for pre-game warmup exercises.

Figure 2. Standing around

The second baseball image that I got from Mr. Wombo had no action; Tyhry and Marda are just standing there, maybe trying to figure out how to use a baseball glove (see Figure 2).

Figure 3. Marda's blond summer

The next baseball scene crafted by Mr. Wombo caught Marda after a long summer in the sun with her hair bleached blond (Figure 3). I've heard female baseball fans comment on their enjoyment of the powerful gluteal muscles of catchers and it seems like Mr. Wombo has a similar theme here. Also, Mr. Wombo does not seem entirely opposed to the idea of baseball players wearing hats.

Mr. Wombo goes Batty

When I made use of the HDR style, Mr. Wombo finally made an image that included a bat (actually, two bats; see the image to the right). Maybe in an alternate Reality, baseball pitchers throw bats and try to hit the ball that another player is holding in their hand.

I asked Bing chat: "What are the rules of the sport Hussade?"

The Bing AI reply: "Hussade is a fictional sport created by Jack Vance for his novel Trullion: Alastor 2262. It is a violent game played on a gridiron above a tank of water. Each team has a sheirl, usually a beautiful woman, who serves as their inspiration. The objective is to score points by throwing a ball into a net behind the sheirl."

Figure 4. Hussade?

 Lies, damned lies and AI hallucinations. For everyone who has never read the science fiction of Jack Vance, let me tell you: there is no ball in the game of Hussade and there is no net in Hussade.

I asked, "How large is the ball that is used in the sport Hussade?"

The Bing AI reply: "I'm sorry, but I could not find any information about the size of the ball used in Hussade. The only description I found was that it was a hard, heavy ball."

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image depicting Marda and Tyhry playing Hussade (see Figure 4).

I asked, "What happens to the sheirl of a defeated Hussade team on the planet Wyst?"

Tyhry and Marda play hard ball

The Bing AI reply: "The sheirl of a defeated Hussade team on Wyst is defiled by a player named Claubus in a very disgusting way. Then she and Claubus are paraded around the field in a cart pulled by the defeated team."

I asked, "In the Jack Vance novel Wyst, who is Claubus?"

The Bing AI reply: "Claubus is a character in Wyst: Alastor 1716, a science fiction novel by Jack Vance. He is a member of a group called the Jantiff, who are dissatisfied with the egalitarian society of Wyst. He is also a skilled Hussade player who defiles the sheirl of a defeated team."

This is wrong in multiple ways. Claubus is not a character. Claubus is a kind of mechanical device that rapes the sheirl of the defeated team. Claubus does not play Hussade. Jantiff is a young man and the main character of the novel Wyst, not a "group".

Figure 5. Claubus and the sheirl.

I asked, "In the novel Wyst by Jack Vance, is Claubus a living Hussade player or a wooden device that defiles the defeated sheirl?"

The Bing AI reply: "According to one source, which is a fan-made commentary on Jack Vance's novels, Claubus is a living Hussade player who defiles the defeated sheirl on Wyst. However, this source does not provide any direct quotes or references from the novel itself, so it may not be reliable."

When I went to the source cited by Bing, I found nothing about Claubus. This might be a case of what is called an "artificial hallucination".

I asked Mr. Wombo to create an image depicting Tyhry and Marda "with Claubus as part of a hallucination" (see Figure 5).

Bing abruptly ended the chat when I told it that it had been spreading a falsehood.

the workout

I don't run a web search company, so what do I know? However, my advice to Microsoft would be to preface statements made by its chatbot with phrases such as, "I'm a stupid chatbot, so I'm not really sure of anything...", "Warning, my answer is only based on one very dubious source..." and "Please verify my answers by reading a reliable source..."

 Blather. Supposedly, ChatGPT has passed the Turing Test. However, I'm highly skeptical about this claim. I think anyone with expertise in any domain of knowledge could quickly notice that ChatGPT does not converse like a human being and has no real intelligence. I'm impressed by the fact that chatbots such as ChatGPT can so easily construct English sentences, but the AI systems show how dangerous it is to unleash software programs on an unsuspecting public when the software has no actual understanding of what it is saying.

Figure 6. human pyramid

I asked Mr. Wombo for a human pyramid (see Figure 6). I wanted to limit the number of human figures in the image to three and I was trying to get an image in which the arms and legs looked reasonable. It is almost beyond Mr. Wombo's abilities to get the limbs of three closely spaced human figures configured correctly.

Figure 7. Tyhry,
Manny and Marda

About the best I could get on the "human pyramid" theme from Mr. Wombo is shown in Figure 7. This image is actually a composite made from two images, with the top half cut from one image and pasted into another image for the bottom half. Still, some obvious defects remain. 😔 Also, I don't understand how Mr. Wombo decides on backgrounds for images. I wich there was a way of getting Mr. Wombo to use actual words in images such as this, not seemingly random letters.

Figure 8. wrestling match

I also tried asking for a wrestling scene (see Figure 8). Rather than two blonds (Tyhry and Manny) I got an image that included two women with dark hair. Sometimes Mr. Wombo just departs from the script for no apparent reason. Mr. Wombo will usually provide women with dark hair unless I specifically request something else. As usual, Mr. Wombo really struggles to provide correct anatomical continuity in limbs when two human figures are close to each other.

leapfrog by Mr. Wombo

I also had Mr. Wombo try to create a visual depiction of leapfrog, but none of the images turned out very good. The image to the right might be Olympic leapfrog in which there is a squad of four team members and three of them have to be leaping at the same time.

more muscle frog

Another leapfrog variant is shown to the left. This is a serious athletic endeavor, so the participants tend to be quite muscular. Many of these scenes that were generated by Mr. Wombo ended up indoors, but some were on the beach.

 Figure 9. Tyhry leaps

 Figure 9 shows Marda, Manny and Tyhry at their morning workout on the beach and Tyhry is in the mood for leaping. Sometimes it creates a real mystery when Mr. Wombo decides to place part of one body behind another person's body.

anti-gravity assisted leaping

I like to imagine that Tyhry has access to anti-gravity nanites, so maybe her workouts involve anti-gravity assisted leaping (see the image to the left). Mr. Wombo has trouble deciding if there should be bare feet or shoes. Often there is one bare foot and one foot with a shoe for a human figure.  

Figure 10

In Figure 10, Tyhry and Marda are playing some kind of ball game on the beach.

 They only have to look nice. The "Flora v2" style for the WOMBO Dream cloud-based image generating software wanted to show Tyhry and Marda running on the water. Many of these images make no sense, but the girls look so cute, I almost don't care.

Figure 11. Ocean runball.

In Figure 11, Tyhry and Marda are using anti-gravity assist shoes to run on the surface of the water. Mr. Wombo has a preference for larger balls than a baseball.

Tyhry and Marda on the field.

Returning to the baseball theme that I started with at the beginning of this blog post, I found it very difficult to get Mr. Wombo to show Tyhry and Marda actually playing baseball. Mr. Wombo's preference seems to be showing them standing around looking cute. So, I captioned the image to the right as "on the field", not "playing baseball". I had to content myself with getting a ball, bat and glove all in one image.

Lat year when I began writing "The Cythyrya Investigation", I was planning to use the telepathic abilities of golfers to illustrate challenges faced by a society during the time when telepathy begins spreading through the population. 

Tyhry on G-World

Most of "The Cythyrya Investigation" is set in in Alastor Cluster where an effort has been made to limit the rate of technological change and prevent technologically-induced problems in society. 

I imagine that the image to the left is an illustration of Tyhry and Marda visiting G-World. Mr. Wombo does not seem to recognize any relationship between baseballs and bats or between golf clubs and golf balls. Also, before I altered the image, the golf ball that is close to Marda was drawn by Mr. Wombo as being larger than the golf ball that is closer to Tyhry.

swinging Tyhry

Mr. Wombo likes to make golf clubs with oddly twisted shafts. For the image to the left, I pasted a straight shaft into the lower left corner. Also, both Marda's face and Tyhry's face were pasted in from other images. 

Don't even get me started on Mr. Wombo's love of tattoos (see the image to the right). 😛 This is one of the smaller tats that Mr. Wombo likes to generate. I was pleased when Mr. Wombo finally came up with an image of a golf club being swung. Again, Mr. Wombo has no way to make sure that balls such as golf balls appear to be the correct size and Mr. Wombo never got the memo about golf clubs actually being used to hit golf balls.

Figure 12. Tyhry batting.

 Mr. Wombo's Reverse Polish Baseball League. Shown in Figure 12 is Tyhry swinging a bat.

Figure 13. fielding

Mr. Wombo comes up with interesting innovations such as having a fielder wear a glove on each hand (see Figure 13). Sadly, it looks like she missed the ball. 

Once again, this was a situation where Mr. Wombo could not connect two objects in a sensible way and the software had trouble associating the baseball with a baseball glove. I specified "catch the ball", but Mr. Wombo seemed to prefer that the ball not touch the glove.

throwing

I had to use Photoshop to put a ball into the hand of Tyhry while she was throwing (see the image to the left).

Figure 14. shorts

 Figure 14 shows my first success getting Mr. Wombo to inpaint. He changed the uniform from long pants to shorts upon my request.

In order to get Tyhry into a swimsuit, I had to start over. Mr. Wombo first made a new depiction of Tyhry in a simple swimsuit and throwing a ball, then some jewelry started to be added in. I'm not sure why baseball players like to wear jewelry, but Tyhry looks good in it.

I had to put a glove on Tyhry; it seemed like Mr. Wombo was resistant to the idea that you need a glove while throwing, but the baseball cap went right on.

Figure 15. BERL ball

 Figure 15 shows Tyhry cool and comfortable in her BERL baseball uniform. I have no idea where Mr. Wombo gets the gibberish words that he likes to put into images (such as seen in Figures 7, 9 and 14).

Mr. Wombo is reluctant to put balls into hands, and in this case, the ball kept moving behind Tyhry's baseball cap. After the first ball disappeared behind her head, I had to paste a new ball on top of her hand.

Tyhry in the REBL

I felt the need to invent a meaning for BERL. However, with the help of the BING chatbot, I discovered that there is a Redwood Empire Baseball League, so I changed her uniform to REBL (see the image to the right).

Strangely, the Bing chatbot insisted that there is a women's baseball league called the "Baseball Empire Redwood League". This must be another example of what is called an "artificial hallucination". The Bing chatbot cited an encyclopedia page that said nothing about the "Baseball Empire Redwood League".

Next: crafting science fiction book covers

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