How I'm Using AI To Bring Photos to Life...

Is this even cool? Am I breaking some rules here?

I feel like I’m cheating. Seriously. What the…

I take this photo from the (seriously) cool art “Prada, Marfa” art installation in Marfa, Texas:

Kind of cool, right? With the lighting and that cool surveillance camera in the middle... I dig it.

So I plugged it into Midjourney and asked it to animate the scene from left to right with a woman walking in the store. This is what I got:

It’s not perfect… but it’s something cooler than I could do with my current animation skillset in like one billion years. So… yeah - this is freaking cool.

Let’s try another one. I took this shot in rural Nebraska to illustrate my time reviewing the Fujifilm GFX 100RF.

I asked Midjourney to animate this as if it were in a rural Japanese field.

Pretty cool. Not just pretty cool. But mind-blowingly impressive. It knew how to create the other side of the camera… in moments.

How about mountains?

Wow.

One more - a very cool shot of a neon light barely visible in the West Texas sky of Marfa:

(This is one of my favorite shots of recent history).

I asked Midjourney to make the sky move::

WOW. Wow.

Is this cool? Am I a fraud?

This IS cool - this is an interesting way I can take photographs and my own personal assets and create new things from them…

but I still feel weird.

I’m building a world around the mysterious town of North Hawk, and these AI tools are allowing me to do some cool things to bring the vibe and concept to life… but I’m still unsure of the boundaries between art, AI, soul, and total freaking chaos.

Dudes and ladies - I’d love to hear from you. What do you think? Am I dealing with something I can’t control? Is Skynet listening to me?

Comment!

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If you want to talk about this stuff - email me - or check me out at www.jerredz.com