The Fake’s Progress

Vanquishing Impostor Syndrome in Digital Art

AI Artist, with a little help from the Author

One day, a few months ago, I decided to try my hand at the visual arts.

Frustrated both with the failure of literary NFTs to gain a foothold, and also with the delayed revealing of my latest purchased AI NFT, I decided to look into the tech underlying these magical creations. There had to be an app for that, right?

And there was — I very quickly got acquainted with Nightcafe, a marvellous commercial tool which lets you get up and running very quickly to produce works of art like this.

Skull plus Afremov styling

I guarantee if you followed the link above, you would be able to produce something similar within five minutes. This is the most basic entry-level AI art, where you are simply transferring the style of a particular artist or painting to another picture. In this case a base skull photo had the palette and techniques of Alfred Afremov applied, in particular his Misty Mood painting.

So far, so unimpressive (though the skull NFT did sell for a few hundred dollars!). But there’s more to Nightcafe than style transfer. You can also generate an image just from a text description. So, for example…