Scully & Mulder AI generated portrait

Midjourney describes themselves as "an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species." In practical terms, they're a small team creating image-generating artificial intelligence technology. They built an image generating program & fed it a data set of millions of internet images, & now users may feed the program text descriptions & receive a brand new, AI-generated image based on its learnings from that data set.

This is a nascent technology that just became available to the public in recent months, & it brings up questions about copyright & ethics that don't currently have answers. Can, will & should the jobs of digital artists & photographers eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence? Who owns a the copyright to generated art? Can it even be copyrighted? These questions & more will eventually need to be answered by creative industries & the courts. In the meantime, the AI image generation space is a wild west with very few rules or regulations.

Our series of AI generated portraits are great-looking fine art pieces, but they are also experiments in how technology parses art & horror. They're reflections, in a way, of the content with which we've flooded the internet. Art styles, characters, phrases & adjectives... the software doesn't really know what any of these things mean, it only knows what images are associated with what words, & which words or images tend to be grouped together. So the results are oftentimes non-sensical... multiple mouths on a face, mangled hands or even a body that makes no sense. But when a generated portrait appears to be sensical, even if only superficially, it's a magical triumph of engineering to comprehensively deconstruct & reconstruct the internet's image library.

It's important to note that these portraits are not custom artwork drawn by an artist. And we price them much lower, accordingly. But they are wholly unique computer generated art pieces that reflect an exciting moment in the timeline of our technological evolution. And they will surely find a valued place in your collection for many years to come.