Gen X Otaku 1971: the OG blog

And for comparison, here's ChatGPT's attempt

 

This took longer to render but it's a pretty good result.  It's an old picture of myself and my first wife (we're divorced).

 

More Grok'd selfies

One more set

This gives me a lot more hair than I actually had at the time....Marine Military Academy summer camp was TOUGH, and they definitely shaved my head Marine Corps recruit style.  I still can't believe I volunteered for that crazy shit.

The image below is pretty accurate but it misinterprets a simple long sleeve shirt for a full Naval dress coat...creative interpretation.

A Selfie made Anime by Grok (my favorite)

This one's probably my favorite.

It's a modified image of myself in my High School Letter Jacket (NJROTC) from my Senior Year in 1989.

I graduated from Clements High School in FBISD, hence the blue letter "C".  I like this likeness of myself as an anime character.  Again, it's blurry and you'd need an actual human artist to clean the image up and edit it if you really wanted to make use of it.  Yes, there's plenty of room for abuse and it does threaten artists....AI is problematic AF.  But I can't deny it's fun to futz around with.  But it also doesn't by any stretch make me an artist.  I can't draw worth shit.  I'm a writer.

Typepad is also being buggy and not letting me upload the original images these Grokified pics are derived from.  Otherwise I would, for comparison's sake.  But it's late and I'm tired and not willing to figure out Typepad's issues right now.

Groking Evil Things Part 2 (AI image transformations)

Yeah, so more dabbling in evil...

I'm the one in the middle...this one actually turned out kinda of nicely.  It was Grok's first attempt and got closest to the mark.

 

I did the evil thing (playing with Grok & image transformation)

So, I really hate myself for how aesthetically pleasing I find some of these AI images.  And we would all do well to bear in mind the wise saying "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness"

Anyway, crudely Ghiblifying some personal photos from High School and early University in the late 1980s and early 1990s amused me greatly.

The AI definitely hit me with a "Japanizing beam" in a number of instances....it does NOT understand American "overseas" caps at all.

Also apparently there shouldn't be women in the background so let's make them enlisted sailors instead?

Kinda turned me into Cro-Magnon Man there trying to make the image fit the anime style.... 

Also, it's messy and blurry and would require a human artist to touch up/fix to be of any use to anyone.  I'm not posting any of this shit to social media because of course I'd be savagely attacked for playing around with this stuff.  It doesn't "make art accessible" or any such nonsense...it's totally just screwing around for fun.   There's a daily limit on what you can do in Grok vis a vis image transformation.  I've got a handful more I want to try out.