Hindik and A.I. art
Rooster prince, by Art Spiegelman
In my previous post about Midjourney and artificial intelligence, I reviewed my experiments with image synthesizers \ image generators \ text to image engines and what I was able to get out of them. My enthusiasm and wonder at first were enormous. What was perceived as impossible to do by a machine turned out to be much easier than we expected. Different generators emerged one after the other with some managing to produce images that compete (at least technically) with professional illustrators and photographers. In this entry, I also mentioned that it is worth entering the field while it is playing and its rules have not been written yet. The easiest thing is to get used to it and create more images according to formats (lines of text that guide the computer) of others that have already been proven to be effective. Midjourney is still the best generator when it comes to concept art and illustration because he learned to produce aesthetic images based on the millions of images he scanned during his training as an image synthesizer.
So why did I relax?
First of all, what it created in me is mainly a desire to create. manually. As the web is flooded with images, many of which I already recognize as synthesized, it emphasizes how I naturally feel regarding what interests me in a man-made image. And no, it’s not the fact that it was made by a person, although the knowledge that it is a human product affects the reading of the image (like children asking if a story is “true”), but because of the added value that a painter’s hand has that is connected to the heart and head. It’s no coincidence that the computer has trouble drawing hands.
The second reason is the “Hindik”.
Hindik is a short story by Rabbi Nachman that tells about a king’s son who went crazy, thinking he was a turkey (“Hindik”). He sits under the table, naked, and eats leftovers. No one was able to heal the king’s son until one healer went and sat with him under the table, also naked, and ate leftovers with him. Then the healer told the king’s son that if he dressed, he would still be a Hindic, and if he sat at the table, he would still be a Hindic and so on. Until finally, after the king’s son gave up on to his hindic and freed himself from all the signs of handicness, he was finally completely cured.
This story has occupied me for years, and for me, it relates to many issues that I will not elaborate on here, such as post-trauma and intergenerational crises and of course the burden of expectations from a prince and the influx to India after the army and the search for madness as an option.
This story created for me a certain image of the Hindik that I had a hard time creating in practice. Shiraz Fuman’s beautiful version of the character influenced me a lot and I still felt that mine was a little different. Shiraz’s illustration was made for “UnGood”, a story by Alon Rothem that we developed following the stories of Rabbi Nachman:
When I played with artificial intelligence I tried to produce a king’s son as he appeared in the original story and in the story me and Alon developed. The result was always terrible. No artificial intelligence knew what “under the table” was, only above the table. It is also difficult to explain what a “turkey prince” is because the result is a “turkey prince”. And asking for a shirtless prince is occasionally blocked because “Shirtless” is a forbidden word.
Here are some “broken” products of Hindik in artificial intelligence:
But then, after many attempts that didn’t bring up anything close to what I was looking for, something surprising happened.
I quickly scribbled a very rough sketch of what I had in mind. A figure of a slightly cocky guy, with a big chest and skinny pants and legs.
I had Midjourney design from the sketch along with a verbal description prompt. And then it came:
Enlarged:
My jaw dropped to the floor. I loved the execution, the sketchy feel with the incomplete coloring and the beautiful pose of the character, but what amazed me was the accuracy of what I didn’t ask for. That was the character. Those dreadlocks that have been pigmented red give a feeling of Chicken Cabbage (it wasn’t in my sketch) and a beautiful balance between chickenness and humanity. The legs are of a rooster doubtless of a man and the clothing reminds of feathers. And perhaps most importantly: it conveyed the feeling that is hard to describe in words of an Israeli guy who ran away to India and became a Hindu there. which is a bit animal and a bit human, masculine and sturdy but also innocent and confused and a little ridiculous. The computer-managed through the sketch and with a dry verbal description to build the figure I wanted and sometimes also draw it, without my asking, from different angles.
It amazed me so much that I printed it out and kept it in my notebook and found it difficult to go back to this software and write on it like before. As if for me that’s it, she did “it”, she turned out to be an “intelligence” that understands me. really. Including nuances that were only in my thought and imagination. And maybe it happened because I helped her with the sketch. Not that the sketch is good or detailed, it really isn’t! But she’s mine and she’s my type, a dialogue that doesn’t exist in verbal requests and it’s hard to close the gap with just words. that they always describe only what can be expressed in words.
Since then I have made more indics in different ways. Some of them are beautiful, strange or taken from diverse worlds, but this Hindu above, who fled to India after the army because of the anxiety of what was expected of him as an Israeli, will go with me to the end.
Finally, here is another demonstration of a sketch that has become a synthesized illustration. I had a dream years ago that I was on the beach in a cute little car when a huge tsunami wave came. I was never able to draw this scene convincingly so I let Midjourney work with my sketch and improve it.
The sketch:
The result:
