Letting the machine decide

I have been toying with the idea to design my own deck of cards (I’ve even spoken to some designer friends about it). I have also been playing with AI generated images… So why not put 2 and 2 and 2 and 2…

The images AI can generate are stunning but there are some inherent problems. For the Aces of Spades you see here I told the AI to create a “dark ace of spades with a realistic skull and gothic/tribal swirls on an orange bicycle playing card background”.

That instruction shows both the strength and weakness of the AI. It’s insane that with such limited instructions a machine can come up with the image you see here. But that’s not an orange background, it’s a wooden table! Reading back through the instruction the problem becomes clear…The AI put the skull on an orange background on a dark ace of spades.

As soon as there is any ambiguity in the instruction you never know what you will end up with. Whether that is a strength or a weakness I’ll leave up to you. That I was never going to get a bicycle background was a given, the riderback design is a trademark of the USPCC, but this is not the interpretation I was expecting. And that is AI’s biggest drawback, at least if you want to use it for design work. Since you can’t be certain what will come out of the machine, getting consistent results (multiple designs that look like a coherent set) is damn near impossible.

As a source of inspiration though,  HOLY SHIT!