Erik Gen

I've been experimenting with AI image and video generations for well over a year now. Cooking images from of the vast digitized information of the visual web doesn't stop to fascinate me. So many possibilities – yet many people who use these new tools tend to generate similar content. I've been browsing AI content posted on social media quite a bit. A lot seems generic and rather dull.  I created the Erik Gen persona to separate work/friends from AI creation and to generate the weirder, disturbing, surreal, uncomfortable etc. Things I can't find in those “pretty” Midjourney galleries. It's mostly just for fun. But I find it exciting to connect with people that seem to operate on a similar wavelength and use these tool to create new and surprising images and videos. There's great stuff around but you have to dig a bit to find it. Hope that some of those artists will post on this site. Love, Erik.

Experiments using Midjourney and Stable Diffusion imgtoimg. I'm getting more and more disappointed using Midjourney. It's always such a fight to get anything but this generic MJ style. SDXL and DALL-E 3 are way better in understanding the prompt by now. I'm often only using MJ as a step in the process, hardly ever as the final result.

Really digging Bing/DALL-E 3 right now. It's really good at understanding the prompt (unlike MJ…).

Another idea to create new and abstract portrait images instead of trying to imitate photography. I see lots of people striving to create perfect proportioned realistic portraits, just like with a camera. Why not taking photos with a camera then? What's the point? Typical example of having a new medium trying to replicate the old and existing.

Fusing flora and fauna (and reproductive organs).

This was just a bit of an exercise how far I can get with the weirdness. I was tired of the Midjourney moderations and played around in SDXL and was quite surprised to see a rather big improvement in image quality. And it's fun to generate without restrictions. I don't think I would have thought about this without looking at the dumb-pretty Midjourney galleries for too long. 

There's something very disturbing about floating people. It's just so surreal and unnatural. I created quite a few sets with floaters. Love'em. 

Growth

Experiments in Midjourney. Metod was to generate closeups than zoom out and then do “strong” variations of the zoomed-out images. This resulted in very unusual and surreal scenarios. 

Test