On AI, Psychedelics, and Spinal Tap

Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd was hardly the only musician to take LSD back in the day. Psychedelics influenced Fish on Marillion’s epic Misplaced Childhood, Jim Morrison of The Doors, and countless others. Each took drugs to expand their creative horizons.

I was thinking about those musicians in the context of playing with AI. Can their failures give us crazy ideas and help us brainstorm?

To this end, I recently took Luma Labs‘ buzzy new image/video generation for a spin. As you’ll see, the results were decidedly weird.

Since I’m a fan of the breed, I started with a simple image of Teddy the Bulldog:

Here’s what Luma created:

Pretty neat, I suppose. When I handed it a cover of The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace, though, the profound weirdness of AI manifested itself. Here’s the cover:

As you can see below, the book’s iconography confused the hell out of our AI overlords:

I’m sure that these tools will improve, but videographers and graphic designers need not worry about losing their jobs just yet.

Simon Says

Still, for creative types, maybe their failures aren’t totally worthless. Could they serve as modern-day hallucinogens? I could see how crazy, incoherent output like the one above might inspire ideas otherwise obtained via acid trips. After all, there’s a fine line between stupid and clever.

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What say you?