PARIS: Jos Avery was given a camera almost 40 years ago and has a lifelong fascination with photography.
But last September, he found a new creative outlet to deceive thousands of people. It’s an artificial intelligence program, Midjourney, that generates wild and stunning images from simple text instructions.
“As soon as I started mid-journey, I was hooked on the creative possibilities,” said Avery. AFPMore.
Midjourney and rivals such as DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion generate unique images by mashing up vast historical catalogs of “trained” images.
Midjourney has been liberating for Avery, a 48-year-old software engineer and lawyer trained in Virginia, USA.
He said he was able to create beautiful art without having to deal with his own social anxiety.
“Then I started wondering if I could create a photo-worthy AI image,” he said.
This led to his fateful experiment. He started his Instagram account to store Midjourney’s output without being completely candid about the image’s provenance.
“Misleading”
“At first, I don’t think many people thought the image was a photograph,” he said. “The eyes and skin were unreal”
He used Adobe Photoshop to fix these glitches and eventually added stunning, wild portraits of beautiful but unrealistic people to his Instagram feed.
More users flocked to his feed, and more thought the image was real.
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“People ask in the comments about my camera and lens setup,” he said.
“Reply back with the actual equipment you use for the actual photo or what equipment you included as part of the prompt.”
He admits his answer was “misleading”.
But he took the deception even further and spent hours selecting and editing images to increase realism, removing previous efforts that were more obviously AI-generated.
His follower count was growing rapidly, so the experiment was a success.
However, he struggled to maintain his façade.
lack of sleep
“My follower and I were disturbed by the misleading responses and could not sleep at night.”
He eventually began telling the expert website Ars Technica what he had done, adding AI mentions to his Instagram bio, and answering his followers honestly.
“Since then, I’ve been sleeping much better,” he said.
Although I was harassed at one point saying I had to block about 30 people, the overall reaction was positive and my Instagram account now has nearly 40,000 followers, We are still growing.
These days, we use both real photographs and clearly labeled images generated from Midjourney.
He says the AI tools have been very informative and helped him discover his love for portrait photography.
But the downside is that he doesn’t sleep well. He stays up all night he’s creating an image of Midjourney.
