Asking AI art to make monsters is easy; most things end up looking monstrous when computers stitch together body parts into something its algorithms say “meh, that’ll do.” Even Dr. Frankenstein knew that fingers don’t come out of armpits, but that was back in 1818; two hundred some years later and we are much better at our monster game than he was.

Making a specific monster that you didn’t make up, that is also pretty easy. You want a vampire? Can you narrow it down to nosferatu, choculatu, or sparkly, please? Coming right up. Goblins, gargoyles, whatever public domain monsters you like, you can get. Where it gets wiggly, however, is when you’re asking for something it has not seen before. That’s much more of an issue of trying to bash a tool that is strongest at learning from examples and synthesizing a novel(ish) variant, into doing something wholly creative. Which, I am sad to report, it isn’t great at.

Flonk is a monster type I just made up, and he looks a bit like a scaly beetle grub with a hooked fish mandible. He also has one pair of arms that he paddles around on when he isn’t bouncing like a Mexican jumping bean larvae. That’s a fairly succinct description for a human to follow, so me dropping a picture of him following such a lofty write up should get you nodding and saying “yeah, I mean, sure, that’s the thing you were talking about.”

See, just like I said you’d say. AI, however, does not interpret that at all. So I have to find the write word salad to convince it to make me something in the ball park of what I want. And.. I have not been successful.

But I did make some really adorbs bugs. I have absolutely no use for these, but they were so cute I couldn’t delete them. I also really prefer them to the bugs we have; I mean, come on, look at that mouse scorpion pillbug. Wouldn’t you want one of those infesting your oatmeal?

I did manage to get close. At least close enough to start to iterate on these and try to bash that into something closer to Flonk. I kinda ran out of time though and needed to move onto other things, like making the back yard livable, but at least I got something out of my art day.

So yeah. I didn’t mean to unleash these bugs from the depths of AI fever dreams. Now that I have though, I kinda want to ask it to make me some more bugs. For science!