The Good Stuff #2
A monthly look at interesting AI art
The Good Stuff is a monthly feature focusing on the best work created using generative AI tools. That can include art, commercial work, viral content, or just something that caught the eye. You can check out Good Stuff #1 here, behind the paywall.
The Tiny Houses on Instagram Civil War
Ben Myhre made the above image using “using a blend of Midjourney AI, Photoshop and Topaz” after a holiday in Greece. It’s part of a consistent theme, fantastical home architecture created with AI tools, that’s bagged him half a million Instagram followers. Which is all great. And he would feature in The Good Stuff regardless. But the reason I’m all in on the AI work of Ben, and others following a similar theme, is that it’s caused a schism in the odd world of Nice Buildings and Places aggregator social media accounts. So when Tiny House Perfect (735,000 followers, posting ‘Daily Inspiring Tiny House Content’) posts Ben’s image, with no mention that it’s AI-generated, all hell breaks loose in the comments. The AI truthers want full disclosure (“All our moms are going to be sending this around thinking it’s real” is my favourite quote). Said moms enthuse about the image, happily oblivious that it’s fake. Others appreciate it’s fake, but don’t care because they just want inspiring tiny house content, daily. The same debate is happening over on the ‘World of Luxury Travel’ Facebook page and hundreds of similar Random Nice Things aggregator accounts. It’s all beautifully low stakes, and I’m all in.
Soulless corporate project looks… good?
Coca-Cola are leaning into the early generative AI image aesthetic with some of its marketing this year. Last week they did a promo with High Snobiety featuring their branding in a variety of cool AI-generated images, as part of an ongoing call-to-action project (no sign of the images on social, but they’re in the High Snobiety piece here). They also recently appointed Pratik ThakarIt as Global Head of Generative AI, not yet a common job title. It’s obviously all very corporate, but away from the marketing jargon, the Coca-Cola branding lends itself well to the shiny Midjourney aesthetic. Established brands may lean into that, by running open-sourced creative projects or, at least, not getting litigious if their branding is co-opted by the generative AI community.
Shiny Disco Cows
Just a series of cows, and chickens, having a glam time. Generative AI has not led to enough images of farmyard animals enjoying a disco and the Happy AIccidents account (5,000 followers) has gone some way to address that. We should be grateful for their work in this field.
AI meets the algorithm
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This is doing-well-on-social-media-good, rather than good-good. But that’s relevant too! The X as Y formula is the most popular method video creators have to showcase AI content. No animations are required, just a slideshow of however many images can be knocked out of increasingly random prompts. ‘Vegetables as Pokémon’, ‘Decades as People’, and ‘Plants as Supervillains’ are all real hooks from a single TikTok account. They are, clearly, not all winners. The Countries as Literally-Any-Inanimate-Object hook seems to be what the TikTok algorithm is currently gorging on.
For the Roman Empire thinkers
The men thinking about the Roman Empire meme was killed stone dead this week when the brands, and Zuck, got involved. But this series from Redditor Klaudio1993 has been everywhere on social since it was posted last month. Hitting the viral sweet spot of being visually striking, insanely impractical and, of course, about Ancient Rome.