AI as a tool for creating feline mockups

The ability of artificial intelligence to create art and write texts is still a bit disappointing. But that doesn’t mean AI is entirely useless; two surprising applications are birthday cards and mockups… In both cases, cats are highly appreciated as support acts.

Bots

A year and a half ago, I wrote a blog post about artificial intelligence. Not long before, the first writing and drawing bots had become available to the general public. I wondered if I could use them in my creative workflow. And whether I should be afraid of them.

I didn’t get very enthusiastic, nor very scared. Of course, if you’ve never seen it before, it’s surprising how quickly such a program writes a text or makes a picture. But if you critically examine that text or image, you find quite a few errors and imperfections. And if you want something specific, like an image of Coolsingel in the snow during the golden hour, you quickly run into the system’s limitations. And sometimes such a bot simply doesn’t understand what you mean.

Infancy

Of course, AI was in its infancy a year and a half ago. Since then, I have continued to follow developments with interest. I came across image generators that didn’t exist at the time, or that at least I hadn’t heard of. Adobe’s Firefly, for example, or Leonardo, Ideogram, to name a few.

But the conclusion remains the same for now: it’s fun, those quick pictures, but I still see many things going wrong. Hands with the correct number of fingers are apparently very difficult, as is stable-looking furniture.

Remix

And there’s not much originality either; a painting in the style of Van Gogh is easily made, but an artificially intelligent new Van Gogh has not yet emerged. AI is mainly good at endlessly remixing existing images and texts. And by now, so many of those images and texts are on the internet that AI increasingly uses its own work to become smarter. That has to go wrong at some point.

I do use ChatGPT to translate my blog posts into English. And it does a very good job; I usually only have to make a few small corrections. But if you ask for an original text, it mostly spews out bombastic language, full of generalities and clichés.

Birthday Card

So is AI good for nothing then? No, there are certainly some useful applications. Creating personalized birthday cards, for example. For the birthday of travel companion A., I asked various image generators for a painting with a drum set, two cats, and a glass of beer, in the style of Alphonse Mucha. Indeed, perfectly matching the birthday person’s world view. The chance of finding something like that in a card shop is of course nil, especially with the right age included.

Fin de siècle

In no time, I had several dozen fin de siècle paintings with the requested theme. I chose sixteen of them and arranged them in a 4 x 4 grid. And I was quite pleased with the result. A colorful and funny ensemble; and a nice collaboration between man and machine. The human has the brilliant idea, the machine does the heavy lifting, and the human creates a beautiful composition.

Guitars

Personally, I prefer guitars to drums, but I share an affinity for cats and beer with A. So the next question to the AIs was: do something with cats, beer, and the aforementioned string instrument. Also, I let the reins loose a bit: contemporaries of Alphonse Mucha could also serve as inspiration. The result: over a hundred pictures with the same cheerfulness as the birthday card project. Or, well, cheerfulness, the dangers of excessive alcohol consumption are also depicted, as some portrayed cats clearly drank too much.

Creativity

I selected the best pieces and shuffled them around until I had a beautiful thirty-six-panel work. And I felt there was enough of my own creativity in it to justify putting that result, as a one and only exception, in my webshop.

Mockups

Not long after, I discovered another useful application of AI image generators: producing mockups for the works in my webshop. In other words, creating sample living rooms where the artwork and photos look good.

ArtHeroes, the platform hosting my webshop, has some nice standard rooms, but they get boring after you’ve used them a couple of times. And modeling and rendering your own realistic sample rooms is a lot of work. Misusing friends’ homes for the purpose also feels a bit off to me. However, with artificial intelligence, an enormous reservoir of unique mockups opens up.

House on Mars

The possibilities are endless. A living room on Mars? A computer screen in the forest? An easel in an Icelandic landscape? A Victorian library? A bedroom designed by Antoni Gaudi? An old house overlooking a harbor with rusty ships? A post-apocalyptic post office? A shattered or torn artwork? You ask, we deliver.

Quality Standards

Of course, there’s plenty to criticize about those images too. Sunlight and shadows sometimes seem to come from the strangest directions. But for mockups to share on social media, I use considerably less strict quality standards than for uploads to my webshop.

Cats

And recently, the cats have made a comeback. In the past weeks, I have been making many feline mockups: featuring cats in a starring or supporting role. AI doesn’t always get that right either. For example, I’ve seen cats with three hind legs. The expression in the generated cat’s eyes is not always cat-like either. And the concept of “kopjes geven” (a cat rubbing its face against something or someone) is lost in translation; the image generator consistently comes up with a literal interpretation: a kitty holding two coffee cups in its paws.

Roommate

But sometimes a cat appears that is indistinguishable from the real thing. So realistic that, after posting on Facebook, I get asked if I have a new housemate. But no, a flat in downtown Rotterdam is not a good place for a cat, so the housemate is only digital for now.