Midjourney

The purpose of the pages in this dropdown menu is to provide artificial intelligence visualizations of scenes, characters, and/or objects described in Robot Dawn. They were generated using the Midjourney AI Bot and are non-literal. By that I mean that they are not exact representations of what I describe in the novel, although they have at times had an impact on the text. Midjourney works off word prompts from which it scours the Internet for what it believes is something approximating the intent of the words provided to it. It selects from a multitude of visual references to generate its output. But Midjourney’s responses are not always accurate. They generally are overwhelmingly beautiful and/or interesting. But they are rarely precise. Some are pitifully short of the mark and others amazingly accurate. Midjourney frequently struggles for an accurate depiction of the human body. These images might be viewed as storyboards for a movie, if someone cared enough for the novel to adapt it for the big or small screen.

I have frequently picked up on tangential subjects to explore with Midjourney. An example is the popular celebrity at the time, Anaïs Laine. She is only casually mentioned a few times throughout the novel, and I thought it would be interesting to see what Midjourney thought she might look like. Turned out rather well I believe. Another example is the images Midjourney generated to bring to life Daisy’s short story from Chapter 12, “Hanna and the Woodchipper.” These would then be images from a story within the story.

I did not use Midjourney as a creative assistant for visualization until I was 80% of the way through the novel’s second draft. I found it helpful but distracting and bewildering at times. Because I believe they might distract the reader, I have not included them as illustrations within the novel but made them available here on the website for reader browsing.

David Sheppard