It also made this header using the title as a prompt.

I recently joined a beta project from Midjourney, self-described as “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought.” The team there has created a tool similar in concept to DALL·E, a generative algorithm capable of constructing images from text prompts. While the AI is dependent on a vast repository of human-made artwork to piece together visuals, it has an astonishing range of output responsive to granular distinctions its users provide.

Exploring this tech, I decided to set it to work imagining the first lines of some fourteen novels. The tool’s interface is incorporated into Discord servers where you call upon the Midjourney Bot to generate images using /imagine and providing it with the parameters. There’s a host of different values and specifications users can input to prompt the program into crafting the picture they want. With as little or as much as given the algorithm processes four low resolution interpretations which can be used as a starter point for further variations or upscaled to a higher definition.

For this series I provided the AI with only the first lines of these novels and specified that it should be in a 16:9 aspect ratio, then selected one of the initial four images I felt best fit the work.

“When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.”

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

“Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway.”

White Teeth, Zadie Smith

“Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself.”

The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.”

The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“There’s a person living not too far from me known as the Woman in the Purple Skirt.”

The Woman in the Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura

“A screaming comes across the sky.”

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

“She rides out of the forest alone.”

Matrix, Lauren Groff

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

“Your house glows at night like everything inside is on fire.”

The Push, Ashley Audrain

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.”

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

“I like to think I know what death is.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.”

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

There you have it. Striking images, some more fitting than others, some disconcertingly on point. The more you use the program the more you see both its limitations and potential. For the best results it’s dependent on a person to guide it along through trial and error to the desired outcome. When interpreting an abstract sentiment it can grasp a few key nouns and adjectives to construct what is ultimately a literal depiction. In the end it is still the humans doing the imagining.

With the history of art at its disposal, AI can mimic our techniques and surprise us with its sophistication, but it will be some time before our artists are out of work. At present the technology allows those without the technical skills to express their own artistic eye by circumventing some of those barriers while still providing the meaning and intention behind the creation. Still, it’s humbling to see a machine do what was once only possible by the hand of humankind.