My Top 10 AI Images of 2023 - - - - - - - - - - - #9 Cthulhu According to AI

In his famed novel, Call of Cthulhu, H. P. Lovecraft describes a statue of Cthulhu as:

"A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind."

I prompted his exact wording into Leonardo.ai and generated several dozen images following that description. All of the images generally had similar aspects, but the level of difference was totally unexpected. Next, I entered more prompts, but this time provided much more details about character placement, size/proportions, and the background/environment setting. Which produced this:

This image above instantly became my favorite image of the group. Cthulhu's size in the far distance, the foggy air, and the mysterious shielded warrior, such fantastic visuals generated in one image. 

More prompted images of Cthulhu are seen below, seen in ranges from traditional to insectoid.

My Top 10 AI Images of 2023 - - - - - - - - - - - #8 Joker Circa 1910

A nice feature of AI image generation is that you can suggest creating an image set in a specific period. For example, imagine if the Joker fought Batman around 1910. AI tends to do a better job with individual characters than with multiple people in one image. This is often because when describing several people in text, AI can lose focus on which person should receive specific details, leading to a tendency to morph two or more characters together.

[Sidenote: If you’re interested in what inspired the character Joker, check out the silent film “The Man Who Laughed”; a truly eerie depiction of a character that would influence comic book/movie culture for decades to come.]

Fabulous sepia toned image of the Joker back in 1910; the expression alone is priceless

Here are some samples of attempts to depict the two characters in a 1910 fighting scene. Note how Batman often appears more manic than his classic stoic expression. It's as if the Joker is wearing the Batman costume. 

Additionally, Batman's armor is too technically advanced to represent his costume accurately in that timeline. Apparently, it seems AI is pulling reference to the Batman’s costume mostly based on the more modern Batman films instead of the cloth based costumes in earlier times.