Amira and Darragh envisioned

The below entry has been cross-posted to my www.justlikeyousaiditwouldbe.com site. With Microsoft Designer in free preview in early 2024 I fooled around with the software—purely for fun—and fell down a rabbit hole generating AI photos of Amira and Darragh. I'm not going to tell you how many pictures I ended up with (far far too many) but I was probably lucky to escape that rabbit hole with some years remaining in my life. The first hurdle was that Dall-E didn't seem to know what Dublin's Ha'penny Bridge actually  looked like and in response to my entered description continually offered up a slew of other bridges that sometimes weren't even footbridges instead. There were also a few issues with unusually large, weird-looking eyes and AI's well-known problem with generating hands. Other times the couple simply didn't match the images of Amira and Darragh I have in my head. Quite often the couple simply looked far too shimmeringly sophisticated, or had faces that unnervingly resembled Sims characters.

If you've read Just Like You Said It Would Be you've probably formed your own images of the characters which might be a little different than mine, but here are some of what I consider to be the most convincing Amira and Darragh in pseudo Dublin locations pairings generated by Dall-E. I relocated the couple to Grafton Street, then Trinity College and Temple Bar for several of the below images, at first hoping to avoid bridge weirdness and then, well, getting carried away. I've started with Amira and Darragh in the rain, but there were a bunch of suitable results amid the slew that didn't match my criteria because like a frenetic gambler I couldn't walk (or click!) away, each win driving me on in the hope of scoring an even better jackpot.

 

Sometimes Dall-E randomly decided to hand Amira the guitar instead of Darragh despite my prompt description. Maybe in a parallel universe I wrote a version of this book where Amira was in a band and Darragh was a screenwriting student?

 

 

No idea what this bridge is, but a good Amira and Darragh. Seeing a little young Rupert Friend in this D.

A and D on Grafton Street. You can see Dall-E doesn't comprehend that the pedestrian portion of Grafton Street (which I specified in the prompt) has no curbs. I can readily buy the couple as Amira and Darragh though.

 

Slight hand weirdness in the next picture, but otherwise a faithful rendering of them.

 

Below caught in a sun shower when I started directing the weather. More good pairings, although the street in these next two looks more like Baggot Street than Grafton Street.

 

 

A few nicely realistic looking couples in the Trinity College grounds. Anyone else seeing a bit of Jenny from the Block in the below incarnation of Amira?

 

 

Right sleeve issues in the next one, AI losing the run of itself with the denim shirt. 

 

In Temple Bar at night.

 

 

 

 

 

My personal fav are the couple below. Pretty cute and with natural looking expressions.  

 

 

And here's a prime example of all the things that can go awry with AI imaging. A serious case of guitars gone wrong (disappears right into his neck—ouch!), hand weirdness and Grafton Street pedestrian fail in this botched Darragh picture. If I had to guess, I'd say these particular D ingredients include a measure of young Brad Pitt and Harry Styles' hair circa 2014.

I wouldn't use these images professionally in any capacity for ethical reasons concerning AI's impact on the arts. Nine of my books were ripped off to train language models without my permission – something I would never in a million years have actually agreed to had I been asked. I firmly believe that AI shouldn't be used in professional or academic writing (whether we're talking about penning essays, music, prose, non-fiction or movies), and in terms of fiction research, that AI should only be utilized sparingly and with extreme caution, with any information obtained from AI double or triple-checked against human sources. Similarly, AI should never be used to substitute for human-created visual arts, but I'll admit the above exercise was an amusing experiment/time sink.