Text-To-Image AI: How the Future Becomes the Present
An Experiment With the Peril and Promise of New Technology
In the 80’s, I landed a job at a large company in the Midwest. Back then, every department had a secretary who answered the manager’s phone, typed memos, created presentation transparencies, and sent faxes.
In the early 90’s everything changed. The full-time secretaries were replaced with temps, then the temps disappeared. Why did this happen, not just at my company, but at many others around the same time?
- New technology provided fuel for a radical change in office work: we had voicemail, handheld cellphones that stayed charged for several hours, and word processors which allowed managers to create professional-looking documents without assistance.
- America had undergone a social evolution: there were increased career opportunities for women and increases in typing class enrollment for boys.
- A recession began in the third quarter of 1990: businesses were forced to make survival decisions they would not have previously considered
By the time economic conditions significantly improved, employment didn’t look the same. Those who might have pursued a secretarial career a few years earlier held more lucrative positions as webmasters and database administrators. The concept of assigning a secretary to every middle manager was viewed as an unnecessary extravagance best left in the past.
Who are the “secretaries” in 2022? Which technologies are about to replace them? To allow you to consider at least one set of possibilities, I’m going to conduct an experiment to see if members of the “creative class” are any more protected from technological change than their blue and pink collar predecessors.
The holiday season will be upon us before you know it, and what would the holiday season be without a full-page magazine ad for Arctic Wolf men’s cologne?¹ Since I can’t afford to hire a creative agency to compose a magazine ad, I’m going to do it all myself. No, I don’t mean I’m going to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a professional camera, a set of lenses, lighting, venue rental, and a model. I’m going to have the Midjourney Artificial Intelligence (AI) text-to-image generator perform the heavy lifting for next to nothing.
This ad will have two images with the first one being the “model.” Instead of conjuring up a human, I’m going to try to create a photorealistic arctic wolf. Here’s one set of results I liked that Midjourney generated in response to the prompt:
Arctic Wolf with large head, front view, anthropomorphic, Low Angle, 35mm, Photorealism, High Detail, Hyper-realistic, unreal engine, octane render, 4K²
In the image on the left, the wolf looks alive, and powerful, and dangerous. It draws you in and demands your immediate attention, an effect that is enhanced by its depth of field. I experimented for about 30 minutes in total with various text prompts, but this is by far the best result.
Now, let’s move on to the second image I’ll need — the cologne itself. I could show the box, but I think the bottle presents more dramatic possibilities. Here is my prompt and its results:
Bottle of cologne, Low Angle, 35mm, Photorealism, High Detail, Hyper-realistic, unreal engine, octane render, 4K, black background
The bottles took around five minutes to create but, as you may have noticed, there is going to be an issue integrating either bottle image with the wolf image due to differing backgrounds. Let’s just work around this potential roadblock in the final design.
This effort doesn’t seem too shabby for someone who can’t even draw a stick figure properly. In fact, it represents a shift that goes way beyond what happened to clerical workers in the early 90’s.
Secretaries lost their jobs because their skills were replaced by software. Graphic artists, illustrators, etc., may see fewer opportunities in the future because their talent is being replaced by software. The gap between creative potential and creative ability is narrowing by the day, and not just in the visual arts, but in music and even writing. Society is becoming increasingly accepting of AI in creative fields.³ In fact, it may not even take another economic downturn to trigger a huge shift in the way creative work is typically performed.
So, for those of you reading this who want to get out of your rut and impact the world, it’s entirely possible the stage is set and you just need to pick up the proper tools to get started. As I witnessed 30 years ago, ruts have a tendency to dead end without warning.
Footnotes
¹ I made up “Arctic Wolf men’s cologne” for the sake of this article. Then, I conducted a U.S. trademark search for Arctic Wolf and did not find any live results in Class 3, the class which contains perfume and cologne.
² Unreal Engine is a registered trademark of Epic Games, Inc. OctaneRender is a registered trademark of OTOY, Inc. I believe these prompt terms generate results similar in style to those produced by Unreal Engine and Octane Render, but that Midjourney itself does not actually utilize these applications.
³ Rachel Metz, AI won an art contest, and artists are furious. CNN Business, Updated 10:54 AM ET, Sat September 3, 2022.
