Midjourney journey 2

Time for another in my little series of explorations into generative art. This is what you get when you tell Midjourney to produce an advertisement for computer hardware "in the style" of a Soviet propaganda poster:

Aside from being hilarious, it also invites a discussion of "style" in generative art. Some people could probably guess the prompt just by looking at the picture. It's not the colored pencil style used to render the thing, it's the composition, the colors, the expressions, the clothing... And it's no mistake that children are featured, since old computer ads really pushed the "help your kids get educated" angle.

I'm not sure if Midjourney incorporates actual Soviet propaganda, or just a bunch of interpretations done by artists trying to mimic the style, but let's assume that someone fed a whole stack of original posters into the training data. First question: Are those even copyrighted?

Well, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian copyright law was altered to have a retroactive effect that covered works created in the Soviet era, and Russia joined the Berne Convention in 1995. So, technically, propaganda commissioned by the USSR is still copyrighted, by ... Someone. Possibly the Russian state, though that's a bit shifty because Russia was not the only territory in the USSR.

Second question: How different are these from the works they're trying to mimic?

For reference, here's the whole set Midjourney produced:

Scouting around the internet it becomes clear that Soviet propaganda was actually much more diverse than what Midjourney produces. It came in all kinds of styles, spanning multiple waves of technical and cultural change. To my eye, Midjourney seems to be pulling almost entirely from stuff in the 1960's about the Olympics. Perhaps a lot of that was fed into the machine.

Here's a poster for a roller derby, "in the style" of Soviet propaganda:

It would have limited utility as a real advertisement for a roller derby, because for example everyone in Soviet propaganda is white and smug-looking. But since it took seconds to produce rather than hours, we can generate it on a lark.

Breakpoint just had to ask for "Soviet Super Mario Brothers":

The more of these you make, the more you get a feel for what Midjourney is drawing from when you ask for a style. And it's clear that Midjourney has particular ideas about style. If you said it's captured the essence of Soviet propaganda, you'd be very wrong. You might be a little less wrong if you said, "It's captured the essence of what people think of when they hear the words 'Soviet propaganda.'" But that would still be wrong.

The most correct way I can put it is, "When you ask for 'Soviet propaganda', you get back what the Midjourney team thinks is Soviet propaganda." That seems harmless... But what does the Midjourney team think "a criminal" looks like? What does the Midjourney team think "a patriot" looks like?

Producing interesting art with generative tools is all about curation, and that includes the curation done by the people who trained the generative tool. You may think the possibilities are infinite, but the output from any prompt is limited - sometimes severely - by what the curators thought was relevant. Your ideas will be directed by that curation, and you will have to fight the tool to move beyond it. And you'll need to apply some critical thinking and skepticism.

Aaah, good ol' Fermi!

If intelligent life is out there, why hasn't it showed up yet? Why hasn't the whole galaxy been paved over with alien fast-food joints?

Well, that could be a difficult question to answer, except it's probably the wrong question, since it assumes the answer to an earlier question: Is paving over the whole galaxy really the top priority for intelligent life? Or even any kind of priority?

We're asking why alien dumptrucks haven't showed up orbiting Earth, demanding coal or uranium or whatever, to feed their hungry engines. We're asking why space isn't echoing with radio signals from all directions, as aliens yell at each other through a medium that takes tens or hundreds of years per exchange. Burning extracted resources for energy and using radio to communicate is the current obsession of modern humanity. But will it be forever? In the meantime, aren't we just projecting our own obsessions onto alien life?

Before we discovered radio, we looked up in the sky and wondered why the gods didn't fly down on winged feet or whatever and stride among us. Now that we've had a good probe around up there and even sent a few humans in cans, we've had to move the gods somewhere else, but found a whole lot more open space than we expected. Electromagnetic energy comes raining down from there, so we've started listening -- in an extremely limited way. And now we ask, why isn't anyone talking to us?

Well, who says the electromagnetic spectrum, radiating out from points in space, is the pinnacle of interstellar communication? There may be something we're missing, down in the quantum foam between atoms, hanging around here on the Earth. It may look like noise right now, and one good reason for that might be that it's packed with trillions of overlaid signals that we don't have the hardware to untangle, or the computing power to decrypt. A whole universe full of life chattering away. Sending signals by wave might be such a crude and energy-hungry strategy that any civilization older than a hundred thousand years or so has advanced right out of it, and into this new thing.

It may also be that such technology brings parallel discoveries. It may be that any intelligent life that joins this unseen conversation also moves beyond energy scarcity ... or finds it easier to spawn entire universes of energy and space right in their own yard, than sending clunky machines made of matter cannonballing around the galaxy to try and gather it up. I mean, really, have you looked into the resource cost of terraforming the planets sitting just one orbit away in our own front yard? It's appalling. How well is that effort going to go across a gulf of, say, twenty trillion miles? And besides, if you heard orderly radio signals coming from a distant star system, wouldn't that star go to the bottom of your terraforming list? Anyone already living there would immediately sabotage your work. Why bother?

This planet sloshed around for 4.5 billion years before intelligent life appeared on it. Humans have been able to listen to space and send crap out into it for one hundred millionth of one percent of that time. Why declare radio and rocketry the last inventions that matter? Why be so quick to declare the end of science? Why characterize spacefaring alien civilizations using conquistador logic that even us lowly humans have discovered is a very poor way to ensure one's survival?