Over the years, I’ve written dozens of paeans, odes to beautiful women whom I’ve seen on the subway, on the street, and in my life. Lately, as I’ve been engaging with my obsessional artificial intelligence, creating images of fictitious women and indulging in manic fantasies, I’ve discovered a significant difference between how I write my paeans and what one needs to write to generate an image that bears any
resemblance to an actual human.
As an example, I will share a paean to a woman I encountered earlier today. Following that, I will present both the representation of that paean using mage.space and the prompt that I had to work on iteratively in mage.space to arrive at a second image. This second image bears a resemblance to the beautiful woman I actually saw.
First, the paean: “FUCK is she hot. She’s about fifty yards ahead of me, her hips swaying hypnotically, in a long, sheer, white, linen skirt. With the sun streaming through the skirt, I can see the outlines of her slender, short, legs. (She’s probably 4’10”, I would guess.) She’s tiny, but there’s no way she’s a child. That human carries herself with a poise and a confidence no woman younger than forty could hope to achieve. Her hair – right on the line between “dirty blonde” and “brunette” – hangs to the middle of her back, and sways almost as much as her hips. Beneath it, I get glimpses of a blue halter bandeau top. I wish to God there were any chance I would pass her, that I would get to see her pretty face from the front. But. I’m turning…..”
Ok. So the first attempt didn’t work. I tried again, getting rid of the height, and “… but there’s no way she’s a child”), which I suspected was the culprit. I was correct. These were my first three responses:
Hot. To be sure. But, um, not what I described.
After about twenty minutes of work, a lot of iteration, and reworking of images, I got to these three (best) ones. They actually come close to what I saw:
There were lots of prompts, and lots of iterations, along the way. And this woman looks tall, which the woman I saw most decidedly was not. But. Not too far off.
Here’s what I had to enter, the last time around:
“A very slender (very short) woman with long brown hair wearing a long flowing white linen floor-length skirt and a royal blue strapless sleeveless halter bandeau top seen from behind on a city street.”
[The parentheses reflect what I’m trying to emphasize. I had to iterate to that, first getting the skirt right, then her hair, then the top. I never got her height right, and gave up after about 50 tries.]