Rosalia

Rosalia had never been a daydreamer. Nor had her dreams at night meant much to her or stuck with her through the days. She was fine with this, blessed with an innate talent to find fulfillment in the pragmatic. What life threw her way, she enjoyed tackling, even when it felt like life was throwing an abundance of pipe wrenches at her ankles. She had no time for fantasy, nor inclination to lament its absence. She did, however, appreciate beauty when she saw it, and was, like anyone she knew, drawn to it and inspired by it. She had not considered this tendency a weakness until after it led her to slip on the black ring (or had it led the ring to her?) The voices it cast into her head threw her life into immediate disarray. They offered her magical solutions to practical problems she thought she'd already solved, forcing her to second guess her original choices. The solidity of her existence dissolved into a roiling ocean of doubt, against which she struggled mightily just to keep breathing. After less than two days, she threw the ring away, without even turning to see where it landed. But later that evening, it was on her finger again. She disposed of it at least a dozen times more, literally flushed it down the toilet (more than once), yet it always reappeared. Finally she just stared it down, glaring at her hand in silence until the ring faded away on its own. She considered this a victory, until she noticed the ring's parting gift, at first in the bathroom mirror: numerous colors in her hair that she hadn't put there. Then the colors were on the mirror, and around it, and spreading onto and staining everything in sight. A pointless, cumbersome power no one had asked for, or likely ever would have. But she knew the game. The ring wanted her to find it again. Only now was she compelled to care enough to ask why.

THE MAKING OF...

This set of images represents the final phase of my increasing frustration with DALL-E 2. For reasons that remain mysterious (by this point, I've come to assume that, like the "black box" functionality of generative AI models themselves, these reasons are simply unknowable), at an arbitrary point in time after beginning to mess with it, and being, for the most part, repeatedly surprised and delighted at the results I was able to produce for around 3 straight months of constantly messing with it, DALL-E 2 just... lost the thread. Whereas my initial set of experiments (resulting in 50 image sets I was pleased with vs. only around 5 that I considered failures) felt like nothing less than a collaborative/creative partnership with the machine "intelligence," filled with the almost spooky sense that I was actually trading ideas back and forth with it, around Halloween 2022 it all went down the tubes, making my original workflow instantly, completely unworkable, as it depended so heavily on the AI spitting out results that were not complete and utter bullshit. That 90% success rate was suddenly a thing of the past. Within the next month, I had 70 new images in progress, but only around 5 of them (a mere 7% of the total attempted) had come anywhere close to a satisfactory finished state... It would take another six-plus months of detours, including plenty of experimentation with other AI engines, to cobble together a new workflow and once again start to produce results I was happy with, and I've had to accept that the majority of those failed intermediate images may never be salvageable. Many of my experiments have involved repeated attempts at just that, but so far it has often proven too difficult to rescue these girls from their shit-image prisons, and instead, I've just started over with new faces...

Rosalia here is a rarity, in that she was started in DALL-E 2 as "the change" was occurring, but as I was working on her during the most intense period of initial frustration, before I had nailed down other workable solutions (and months before "generative fill" would become a thing), she basically got transported into a stock image background, given stock image legs and feet, and bitterly Photoshopped until I felt a sufficient amount of transformation had taken place.