Buld First Contact

Figure 1.
Generated by Wombo Dream.

 Here in this blog post I'll be updating some of my old illustrations from the Exode Saga by making use of artificial intelligence software to generate new versions of old images. Why am I going back ten years to revive old images from the past? For me, imperfections in those story illustrations are a constant source of discomfort. Now that I can employ AI tools like DALL-E and WOMBO Dream, I simply can't resist trying to improve those old illustrations.

The image to the right (Figure 1) was made by using an old image from 2013 (see Figure 2) and this text prompt: "high resolution movie still showing a park ranger and a tall slim woman dressed in white near the Washington Monument, the woman is holding a bright light source in her hand, an alien spaceship in the background, the spaceship is cloaked and appears as a fuzzy semi-transparent blob".

Figure 2.
Old image from 2013

Mr. Wombo (my pet name for the WOMBO Dream software) did not understand what I meant by "the spaceship is cloaked and appears as a fuzzy semi-transparent blob". In the original image (see Figure 2), I tried to give the hovering spacecraft blurry outlines. When the Buld finally arrived on Earth (after a ten thousand year journey from the galactic core) they were reluctant to interfere with the course of history on Earth. The Buld woman, dressed in white, is going to have to use her memory-editing nanites to deflect the attention of the park ranger.

Figure 3.
Obtaining a brain pattern.

 Gohrlay's Brain. One of the key events in the Exode Saga is when Gohrlay's brain is scanned and her brain pattern is used to create the first positronic robot's brain circuits. To get the image that is shown to the right (Figure 3) I used an old image from 2013 (Figure 4) as a reference with this text prompt: "science fiction magazine cover showing two women who are part of a brain scanning procedure, Margot Robbie is laying on a table, dressed Victoria's Secret style, Megan Fox is looking at a video screen image of a brain, Painted in the style of Edmund Alexander Emshwiller".  In the years since 2013, I've developed the habit of often converting illustrations for science fiction stories into imaginary book covers.

Figure 3 well illustrates Mr. Wombo's penchant for converting inanimate objects into human Figures. In this case, I did not mind the insertion of a third woman into this scene.

Figure 4. Gohrlay's brain in 2013.

The original "Gohrlay's Brain" image from 2013 is shown to the left (Figure 4). The original elements in this scene were taken from old science fiction magazine illustrations and the title of the imaginary magazine was inspired by this horror magazine. Here in 2023, Mr. Wombo updated the brain scanning equipment for a new millennium (as shown in Figure 3).

In the old magazine cover art, human artists had no problem painting hands and fingers. In contrast, Mr. Wombo really struggles to generate anatomically correct arms, hands and fingers.

For the 2013 brain scan image (Figure 4), I pasted into the scene an actual brain scan. Figure 3 is completely AI-generated except for some of the text.

Hi Tek™ brain scanning.

Mr. Wombo was certain that a virtual reality headset can make extracting a human brain pattern much easier.

Cool shades.

 Goggles. However, it seems like Mr. Wombo does not have the concept of actually looking at data that is being displayed by a virtual reality headset... headsets just look cool. Mr. Wombo could not even decide if her eyes should be open or closed. The version that is shown to the left was made using the "Steampunk v2" style of Wombo Dream.

Figure 5. New recursion
for 2023 by Mr. Wombo.

 Recursion. I enjoy recursion as an element of science fiction stories, particularly science fiction stories that mention science fiction. For the Exode Saga, there is the Writers Block, a special place at Observer Base that has a large archive of science fiction stories, many that are unknown on Earth. In the Ekcolir Reality, science fiction story telling was used to prepare Earthlings for First Contact with the alien Fru'wu. 

In the Buld Reality, First Contact went essentially unnoticed, but in the Ekcolir Reality, the Fru'wu shared advanced technologies with humans in the 20th century. That technology had unintended consequences, leading to catastrophic global warming and dramatic sea level rise when the Antarctic ice all melted.

Figure 6. From 2013.

Here in the Final Reality, when there was no physical evidence for aliens, the Editor began to describe the Secret History of Humanity in a series of science fiction novels that constitute the five novels of the Exode Saga. However, eventually the Editor decided that it was not wise to draw attention to his family and their alien-derived gene patterns.

Back in 2013, I made the image that is shown to the left (Figure 6) as a way of illustrating recursion. With the help of Mr. Wombo, I made the image that is shown above in Figure 5. Here, Mr. Wombo spontaneously made all of the human figures female when I used this text prompt: "a high resolution movie still of a young Megan Fox seen from behind while she paints a man who is a sculptor, the sculptor is sculpting a statue, the statue us using a hammer and chisel".

Figure 7. Mr. Wombo's tall artist.

 Going up. For Figure 5 (above) I also placed these three "artists" on an imaginary book cover. When I look at Figure 5, I can't decide if there is  human artist at work in this scene or if I am looking at a completed sculpture that simply includes three human figures. Mr. Wombo was also uncertain about this scene and when using Figure 5 as a reference image, Mr. Wombo went off in some strange directions.

For the AI-generated image that is shown to the right, Mr. Wombo's chosen direction was up. I've previously had fun with Mr. Wombo's tendency to create tall people with four arms (for example, see Figure 16 on this blog page). Here, I imagine this is a sculptor with four arms and two heads who is creating a sculpture of a woman with a very long neck.

The only alteration that I made to this image was to have Mr. Wombo re-generate the lower face. In the original AI-generated image, it looked like that face had two noses.

Figure 8. Replicoid game.

However, maybe the human figure on the left side of Figure 7 is actually a manikin. That is how I interpret the image that is shown to the left. In my science fiction stories, I often want to have artificial life forms (such as replicoids) or robots with synthetic bodies.

For the Foundations of Eternity, I use this banner image:

Foundations of Eternity banner (source). R. Gohrlay.

I don't imagine that the first bodies for positronic robots like R. Gohrlay were very sophisticated.

Figure 9. Sculpting studio.

 Wombo Studios. Maybe Figure 8 (above) shows some on-going humanoid robot design work at Observer Base when the first positronic robots were being built. I was using my text prompt about "sculpting a statue", so I'm not really sure why Mr. Wombo often crafted images with what look like manikins. Some of the images were like the one shown to the right, which is more like what I think of when I say "statue". Figure 9 is one of the few AI-generated images that I show here without making any modification. Maybe this is a scene from the Wombo Art Studio, where the artists have to work overtime with fig leafs and strips of gauze to make sure that no offending body parts are rendered by the image-generating software.

Back in March, I experimented with trying to create transparent human figures as part of trying to illustrate teleportation. Here, I was content with conventional opaque statues, but I wanted them to be painted.

2021 illustration: painting a statue.

Two years ago I had a character (Lany) in one of my science fiction stories who was a sculptor. At that time, I made the illustration that is shown to the left. That was supposed to be Lany paining one of her sculptures. Can I now do better by using WOMBO Dream?

Figure 10. New statue painting in 2023.

The image that is shown to the right (Figure 10) was generated by Mr. Wombo in two parts. For the statue (left side of the image) I used this text prompt: "a museum statue, the statue is tall and slim, narrow hips, skinny waist, the statue has long blond hair". 

Figure 11. With Lany's helper.

For Figure 10, Lany the painter (right side of the image) was generated with a text prompt that included, "Kate Jackson is using a paint brush to paint a statue, Kate Jackson has one arm extended and holding a paint brush". The two AI-generated human figures were then pasted into a background image that I can imagine to be Lany's studio.

Why is Lany using such an unusual method to apply paint to the statue? For Figure 11, Lany is shown having to reach over her robotic assistant, Kate.

Figure 12. The artist's model.

The image to the right (Figure 12) was generated by Mr. Wombo when using Figure 5 as a reference image and making the image generation process only weakly dependent on the reference image. For this scene, Mr. Wombo seemed to forget all about sculptures and statues. In my imagination, she's a model and is serving as a living reference for other students in the art class who are painting or sculpting a human figure.

Figure 13. Sculpting tools.

One of the major frustrations of collaborating with Mr. Wombo to create illustrations for science fiction stories is the fact that Mr. Wombo struggles to create images in which people are doing something interesting with their hands. Maybe in the image to the left (Figure 13) the two sculptors are using a Wombomatic hand adjuster to sculpt the hand of the blond statue. I specified in my text prompt to have the two sculptors holding tools, but I had to just paste in various objects to cover up the anatomically incorrect hands that Mr. Wombo had generated.

Figure 14. Large sculpture project.

For some of these sculpture images that were generated by Mr. Wombo, the sculpture was extra large. In the case of sculptures created by Lany, I originally imagines life-sized sculptures of human figures or small synpaz replica. However, maybe some residents of Observer Base would have requested that Lany craft particularly large statues that could be displayed in places like backyard gardens.

 Lany at large. In the original AI-generated image for Figure 14, there was what looked like a small paint pallet or some similar flat surface near the artist's left hand. I pasted another AI-generated image into that space and added another reference image at the left edge of the scene in order to cover up a strange right arm that Mr. Wombo had generated for the giant sculpture. I imagine that the sculptor is painting the sculpture in an attempt to make it appear as life-like as possible. 

Bisop the humanoid robot.

 Life-like Artificial Life. For my science fiction story called Echo of Cynym, I had a character (Bisop) that was an artificial lifeform, but Bisop was trying to live among people without revealing the fact that she was a robot from the planet Triskelion. In trying to illustrate such a character, I want images that can appear almost human, but just slightly artificial.

Figure 15. From Jan. 2023.
This image was made using "Pallas - 47"
by mjranum-stock.
Available under the CC BY 3.0.

To generate the image that is shown to the left, I used the book cover image that I made back in January (Figure 15) as a reference image for Mr. Wombo along with this text prompt: "a science fiction book cover showing a humanoid, the humanoid has long blond hair, the humanoid is dressed Victoria's Secret style in strips of transparent plastic that glows, a planet and stars in the background, the humanoid has very large blue eyes".

Figure 16. Artificial lifeform.

The image in Figure 16 is an example for which Mr. Wombo was able to move towards the "strips of transparent plastic" that I was hoping for. In this scene, Bisop seems to be on the surface of a planet with a treeline in the background, but as usual for a text prompt that mentions "science fiction" there is a planet instead of the dangling tentacles in the reference (Figure 15). 

I've placed some other renderings of this scene at the bottom of this blog post which illustrate the spectrum from a quite artificial appearance for Bisop to one that is more normal for a human. By asking Mr. Wombo to generate images of a "humanoid", I was hoping to get AI-generated images of a humanoid robot that looked just slightly "robotic" in some subtly way.

Figure 17. A robot of Aurora?

And the answer is "no": the PG13 version of WOMBO Dream did not generate those nipples for this scene (Figure 16). The nipples in Figure 16 were not AI-generated, they were manually copied over from Figure 15. In Echo of Cynym, Bisop is quick to show her breasts to the Editor when he arrives on the planet Dethevicinelec. The one WOMBO Dream style that will sometimes generate an image of a nipple is "Gloomy" (see the image to the right). 

There is a point in Isaac Asimov's novel The Robots of Dawn where Asimov describes the fact that the rather artistically inclined Gladia designs "surfaces" for household servant robots that in a subtle way suggest clothing. Figure 17 might be the sort of robot "surface" design that Gladia created for the people of the planet Aurora, a kind of surface design fashion that some Aurorans might have had built into their household servant robots.

Dawn robot #1.

Dawn robot #2.

When using the image shown in Figure 16 as a reference image, Mr. Wombo was able to quite consistently generate addition images that I can imagine as being depictions of robots on the planet Aurora. Two such images are shown to the left and to the right. Asimov seemed to imply in The Robots of Dawn that within the social system of planet Aurora, casual sex with household robots was not unusual.

The 2023 SIHA Award.

 In 2024: Part 5 of the Mosy Saga. 

Next: the 2023 SIHA award winner.

More Robots of Dawn; compare to Figure 16. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers