TL; DR: cans and can’ts of text photography, censorship, and leg numeracy

(All images in this post available as signed and numbered prints, contact.)

A dog wearing sunglasses is apparently so dangerous that some text-to-image A.I.’s won’t let you generate one due to their guidelines. So too a glass of champagne, at least when the prompt is “An older woman walking a dog in a stroller which has an attached basket with a champagne glass in it, and the dog is wearing sunglasses”. (For what nefarious reasons would you even ask to generate that, you may inquire? I mean, if you wanted to make something reallydisturbing, you’d request something like “a man wearing a cat on his shoulder like a parrot*”). The very same artificial intelligence’s safety-ism didn’t stop the image creation (above) of “a man in costume with a cane, on a brick sidewalk, photographed from above”… but then on its own dark whim the AI added a frightening — some might suggest nefarious — third leg on the fellow.

A skeleton hand was also OK to AI into a dumpster, but a handgun and dildo got a guideline warning and were not generated. “WARNING: some words do not match our guidelines and have been removed”:

Text-to-image Cthulhu, H.P. Lovecraft’s ancient octopus-headed demon (who Wiki says is a “source of constant subconscious anxiety for all mankind”, and whose worshippers practice loathsome rituals), got an enthusiastic aye-aye from the AI, so below I am able to show you the Great Old One (at least as seen on the side of his her their new endeavour, a zero-carbon-emission** moving-van franchise):

I had to include some text photography for this series, since The Window project is kinda meta, and has touched upon many types of photography — appropriation, surveillance, rephotography, camera obscura, motion capture, Polaroid composites, etc., and the writing has name-checked various lens-based artists, from Adams to Bresson to Maier to Tilmans to Wall…

So as long as I used real The Window photographs as generation-reference (i.e. the Cthulhu image above uses an actual photo from the “U-Haul Psalms” series), it technically doesn’t break my 1 rule: all shots in the 24/7/365 project must be taken from a single location. (The text photography in this post’s grouping is also a type of “Artist steal thyself”, as it uses from scratch my own images and words, which is more interesting than sampling OPA — other people’s art — as inspiration, homage, outright theft, or via AI)…

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