Have you ever wondered what it would look like if Charles Darwin rode Napoleon’s horse into battle against a dragon and its army of video game characters?

Well, you could spend years – even decades – on artistic and design training to create the tableau yourself … or you could circumvent all that by using one of the many AI art generators that have become the subject of much public discussion recently.

Platforms such as Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which emerged in 2021 and 2022, allow users to type in a prompt from which the generator lifts keywords that it uses to comb or “scrape” databases of photos and other existing artworks on the internet. A neural network then algorithmically interprets relationships between the source art using the prompt, then generates your portrait of Darwin in the style of whatever artist your heart desires – Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh or even Yayoi Kusama.

Pic: MonoC, a virtual human designed by Hong Kong company Gusto Collective, is described on her Instagram account as a “digital creator” and woman of contradictions. Photo: Handout

Read full article in the South China Morning Post...