Fooling Around With Artificial Intelligence: Mixed Feelings

Ever notice some images or videos online or in movies just don't look right? It's likely because they are A.I. generated. You know, the photos look too perfect. Some scenes seem almost unnatural. I don't doubt that A.I. has many legitimate uses, in technology and other applications, but I'm not a big fan in general and treat it with a good amount of skepticism. But, having said that, I found a simple application recently and decided to have some fun with it...starting with some 35mm photo prints I recently got back from the processing lab. I used a thrift store vintage Nikon and a roll of outdated Kodak color film. Here are the originals -

The combination of an old camera and expired film caused the images to be desaturated, grainy and not very sharp. My personal opinion is that those aren't necessarily bad things when shooting film. They can give a picture a little more...personality I guess. And these gave me an inspiration for the prompts I would use when running them through the A.I. photo editing application. My prompt was "Add a dystopian futuristic effect to this photo." Here's what was generated -

The artificially generated scenes actually compliment the original photos and represent the written prompt accurately, and it was kind of fun. So I decided to try an image generating function within the same application. Unlike the photo editing program where I uploaded my original photographs, the image generating program requires only a written prompt without any visuals. I used this original photo as inspiration for a written prompt without actually uploading it -

This was my written prompt -

This was the image generated -

Not bad. But it just doesn't look real. Definitely not like a photograph. More like a painting.

I then moved on to the next experiment. My idea was to ask the program to write a Haiku poem. If you are not familiar, a Haiku consists specifically of three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line and five in the third line. That's a rule. Otherwise, it's not a Haiku. Here's what I got -

Pretty. But incorrect. The last line contains only four syllables. Na-tur's-soft-song. That's four. 

I figured even artificial intelligence is allowed a seemingly inconsequential mistake occasionally. So I gave it a chance to redeem itself by asking a question which I admit is not general knowledge but one I know what the correct answer should be. The question was What Bob Dylan album and song contains the line "Is it rolling Bob?"  The answer received -

Wrong. It's on the intro to the song "To Be Alone With You" on the Nashville Skyline album spoken by Dylan to his producer Bob Johnston. It's a bit of obscure music trivia, but true Dylan fans and rock music aficionados will know this. One would think A.I. should know it, too. If not, it shouldn't try to fake it. 

Okay. One more chance. A simple question. This time it got it right -

To sum up: Do I trust artificial intelligence? Not entirely. But on the subject of chickens...completely.

Roger O'Dea     12/1/2025