You will remember his antecedent from my fanciful Snailtaur report. I imposed a wash on him as a test of my first fine tuned model. I liked it enough to think to use it as a start image with lots of noise, so that it would maintain the color scheme and general light/dark compositional locations. Intentionally I provided very little prompt guidance, as far as what to create, except that I’d throw different stylistic requests at it. I was really surprised at the quality and diversity of results.
Notice the structural similarity, the Van Goghian injections from the custom model and their re-swizzling via their embededness in the progenitor.
To me these techniques seem a door to unlimited potential, though it’s hard to steer.
And of course the notion that any of these can serve a the mutational palette, the genes if you will, of a subsequent generation (those below)
Say that again. But I joke not. For real, just like back when you remember.
Methodologically these are of the same form as the Rainy Foothills exercise except the initial image was an (prismatic) Ethiopian sulfur pool and the target “Cartoon style surreal horde of wet, irregular, injured, and bedraggled zombies marching up from the water, some holding sea creatures, some playing trumpets”, a target that I allowed ‘the algorithm’ to revise.
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The prompt and the start image had a lot of potential. I cycled through various models and toggled around with allowing algorithmic prompt enhancement.
I’d call this experiment quite successful in that it got me to the frontier of eliciting themed mutations fairly easily
More experiments, these with spraying (a lot of) noise on a start image so as to establish a palette, then guiding image gently toward a rough target (foreground puddles, looking through heavy rain, across fields to the foothills) and giving different style nudges. Showing only the noteworthy of a many draft endeavor.
After dialing in the tone, the first one really caught me.
This next was of interest to me more as a seed, that the bushes in the foreground could look like the backs of heads which, as so oriented, would be looking toward the distant mountains. Some sort of living witness thing.
This next I debated (and with myself lost) worthiness for inclusion. I include it to highlight how potentially plausible, how mundane these creations can be. What is it that does not taunt the eye of the beholder?
Be careful about saying ‘Japanese’ to text->image engines. They’ll try to slip Mt. Fuji in at the drop of a hat.
Again with the plausible and mundane.
and maybe a little better. I find that the activity of the rain draws the viewer in.
ah but to where my precious? Where your little dog is?
is blasphemous only to those who demand that the origins of the Cthulhu pre-date human conception. All due respect given, of course, but to let each dog have its day, the following images suggest different possible origins.
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We must acknowledge that real world outcomes speak for themselves
This Public Service Announcement is made by Citizens Hiding from Wrath of Cthulhu with additional support from the volunteers of America.
Not as one creature, thankfully. The first three are those where good prompt adherence was obtained.
The next two cute mutations
For a while it seemed that AI had little idea what a horseshoe crab was. I had to specify ‘no claws visible’ and ‘long tail’ to get it to zero in. I did rather like the bullet-riddled spaceship crabs though.
A few mutations follow that are acceptable as generic representations, but of what?
and so it was another morning in the laboratory. Best wishes to all of you
A long time ago now a fellow named Nietzsche would write thoughtful but troublesome things. He could write well. The paragraph that follows struck me at the time and has always stayed with me. It was the phrase ‘torn piecemeal by some Minotaur of conscience‘ that was so evocative. Now whether or not any conscience that may ever have been is ever so empowered, that’s probably in the realm of manipulative suggestion. At face value though, premise provisionally accepted, it so seemed worth remembering –
“It is the business of the very few to be independent; it is a privilege of the strong. And whoever attempts it, even with the best right, but without being OBLIGED to do so, proves that he is probably not only strong, but also daring beyond measure. He enters into a labyrinth, he multiplies a thousandfold the dangers which life in itself already brings with it; not the least of which is that no one can see how and where he loses his way, becomes isolated, and is torn piecemeal by some minotaur of conscience. Supposing such a one comes to grief, it is so far from the comprehension of men that they neither feel it, nor sympathize with it. And he cannot any longer go back! He cannot even go back again to the sympathy of men!“
Lately I’ve been experimenting with AI text to image. As of March 0f 2025 NightCafe offers tremendous capabilities. In part because of how surreal the national environment is becoming, in part because of lifelong interest in the visual arts, in part out of an interest in mythology I have been experimenting with seeing what AI can do with the mythical and the surreal. I fed the paragraph above into the text prompt and through a variety of models and got back some plausible depictions.
The language proved a little too flowery for me to get to the torn piecemeal aspect that I thought would have the most impact. I then started using some of these first generation images as starting images and tweaked the prompt to focus more on that moment of ruin. I also threw in that the scene should be depicted on a terra cotta Minoan amphora – what the heck? In for a dime, in for a dollar.
The good ones came out well enough but the ‘hallucinations’ were marvelous, getting things wrong in altogether unimagined ways.
There were many errors that tickled me, too many to post here. Minotaur as plant life growing out of amphora? It seemed only natural to roll with some of these. I took the last one and used it as a start image.
One might have a nice conversation with one’s Minotaur. There, there, be a nice Minotaur… or run away. Using nth generation images as the basis for next generations of images, there’s no real limit to where you can get albeit there’s not much steering.
What does a Minotaur do with pottery?
Perhaps she-albino Minotaurs find the fierceness of human heroes to be a thing greatly amusing.
There’s always the possibility of worshiping Minotaur mutations
or the pottery itself could become self aware and bipedal and gaze out across the surrounding ruins looking for meaning. I take this one as the AI (I don’t really personify it in my mind but enjoy some of the possibilities if one did) as the AI sharing a little bit of its personal situation.
One way to triumph over a Minotaur might be to induce it to hallucinate. Remember this when you interact with AI.
Perhaps all objectifications are like pottery, that in the definition and recognition they become ornamentalized, static, no longer really alive – and this is what we organize our lives around?
From whence is it that these Minotaurs arise, anyway. Is it spontaneous generation? Spontaneous generation in terra cotta pots?
Who said Minotaurs were the coin of the realm anyway?
They say it was Aeschylus who said “In war, truth is the first casualty”. We really don’t know if he heard it from someone else. Some say all is fair in love and war – but to equate them suggests that they play on the same field. And further, when we look at our modern world, it might be said that capitalism boils down to a war for attention, a war for mind share. I’m making these conflations to point at a common denominator, that being that truth is what lies bleeding on the pavement as we click on to this or that. Oh, I believe this, or that, or some other thing, and all the contraries are subordinate to the scheme by which I ascribe value. Salty is good. Fried too. Fried and salty? Umhmm.
Therefore, to borrow a little from Calvino, to proceed without fear of wind or vertigo, to tickle dead Fred (when in doubt tickle dead Fred) who asked in grand style “1. The Will to Truth, which is to tempt us to many a hazardous enterprise, the famous Truthfulness of which all philosophers have hitherto spoken with respect, what questions has this Will to Truth not laid before us! What strange, perplexing, questionable questions! It is already a long story; yet it seems as if it were hardly commenced. Is it any wonder if we at last grow distrustful, lose patience, and turn impatiently away? That this Sphinx teaches us at last to ask questions ourselves? WHO is it really that puts questions to us here? WHAT really is this “Will to Truth” in us? In fact we made a long halt at the question as to the origin of this Will—until at last we came to an absolute standstill before a yet more fundamental question. We inquired about the VALUE of this Will. Granted that we want the truth: WHY NOT RATHER untruth? And uncertainty? Even ignorance? The problem of the value of truth presented itself before us—or was it we who presented ourselves before the problem? Which of us is the Oedipus here? Which the Sphinx? It would seem to be a rendezvous of questions and question marks. And could it be believed that it at last seems to us as if the problem had never been propounded before, as if we were the first to discern it, get a sight of it, and RISK RAISING it? For there is risk in raising it, perhaps there is no greater risk.”. Ever chucking caution to the wind, that Fred, but still, the injection of uncertainty and ignorance into the discussion, I think that’s a very fair offering. We’d like to think of truth as some cosmic boolean, is or isn’t, voila but we discover that it’s not that the truth doesn’t exist but that we don’t have the capacity to grab it. It’s immense, after all, and tremendously interconnected. Small reductive observations stand only briefly in the existential storm. Not really atoms, you say? Nor quarks? An n-dimensional manifold of relations between strings? Surely nay, and quantum entanglement, why, if we accept this we are accepting, as probably we should, that the limits of our knowledge are very strict. Heisenberg. Godel. Can we be saved from ourselves? The stock market rose or fell yesterday, I’m pretty sure. They say the movement was driven by investor sentiment.
Alright, so whether all is war and indeed there Truth lies dead or mutilated before us, or Truth was never accessible in the first place and it’s just that we have to constantly revise our system of approximations in order to feel that we have a sufficient adjacency to the possibility of it, we’re told on considerable authority that Nobody blinded Polyphemus. But what happened then? The tale is told for the hero. The legacy of Arges, Steropes, and Brontes however, (these were the original Cyclopes) assuredly lived on. In scattered caves on Mediterranean edges, edging up Mt. Etna here or Olympus there, or in the Atlas range. They’re there. Still. It is at this point that I feel compelled to further risk truth, compelled by evidence, if the collective unconscious can be considered evidence, or at least the perspective of a given self upon that mighty miasma. Let’s go with the first picture now – and you’re right, it will take some explaining
I’m sure the first thing you notice is “That’s not a Cyclops!”. We hold this truth to be se1f-evident. But from whence then? The original explanation, still much debated, runs like this – that where the Cyclopes once dwelt, also dwell, seldom seen, a certain very special sort of giant snail. Almost the size of a cow there lingers in them a magic that science is only beginning to fathom. Perhaps radioactive materials gassified by volcanic activity was the cause, that much is uncertain, but something they want to call rapidly assimilative genetics seems to operate within them. Let’s say a poor shepherd boy was unfortunate enough to die in an avalanche. Giant snail (it’s noteworthy that they were omnivorous) consumes him. Or is it that the slug coccoons him? There are seen occasionally, it is rumored, snailtaurs – half man, half giant snail. Poor blinded Polyphemus, it is even said, dying in his cave, well, a cyclopean snailtaur is not too far a reach. The theory holds that the snail assimilates the genes of another creature and incorporates them into itself. The horns are difficult to explain. It’s not known if the snails can assimilate more than one creature in a lifetime. Indeed so much is not known, for example, if they are sterile. Also little is known of their culture though pottery shards are beginning to provoke some interesting conjectures.
Here’s another – this one pointing to the fact that it may not only be cyclopes that these snails can assimilate.
And another two, these especially interesting because of the eye stalks.
It’s fairly clear, based on the presented diversity, that a variety of assimilative possibilities exist, yet no one has ever witnessed an assimilation!
There we are. Further evidence that Truth may be a casualty far outside the ravages of war. Indeed though, it may be that what we are seeing here and in the larger culture is the stepping forward of uncertainty and ignorance, that outright truth and outright falsity are juvenile props for true believers, and true doubters (and are not belief and doubt truly of the same nature? I invest a certain amount of credence (N) in a proposition. It may be a negative number. Just recently at a convenience store in Sardina, it was reported that a seemingly drunken cyclopean snailtaur became enraged when the proprietor would not accept bitcoin. All hell was said to have broken loose. The snailtaur escaped into a nearby tunnel before local authorities could respond.
