–OR– Edna St. Vincent Mall-AI
For the last month I’ve been ecstatically devouring Nancy Milford’s extensive biography of poet and performer Edna St. Vincent Millay. “Vincent” led a life that was full of delicious intrigue, passionate love letters, writing poems in bed, and other ways to burn the candle at both ends.
Milford is an excellent biographer, and a talented writer herself. One of the best things about Milford’s writing is the way she describes Vincent’s clothing and style throughout the first half of the 20th Century.
So often, I delighted in this author’s descriptions of old photographs, but couldn’t quite conjure images from all the words. When my mind read phrases like, “Pirette costume,” “long skirt with panniers at the side,” or “fitted brocade jacket,” I literally drew a blank. No search results found in my memory bank, so to speak.
So whenever a particularly fun masquerade party or year abroad came up for Vincent, I read the paragraph describing the photo into an image generator.
***Here, I must say: I’m paying attention to the discourse around who owns or “created” AI-generated (or -foraged, or -stolen) content. I reserve the right to remain skeptical of this tech and our ability to use it well.
Oh, and I’m also using “AI,” which officially stands in for “Artificial Intelligence,” as an easy shorthand, but I understand that these services aren’t independently intelligent beings. They can’t reason or think critically. Sometimes these services hallucinate. They are a nightmare for educators at all levels. They’re an ethical minefield and possibly very, very bad for creative types like myself. I believe all these concerns need to be spelled out in better contracts as a result of the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes.***
ALL OF THOSE CAVEATS ASIDE, I have been feeding Nancy Milford’s descriptions of different photos of Edna St. Vincent Millay throughout her life into the Bing AI Image Creator.
And may I say, the results are horrifying. I am so intrigued by how terrifying these are!
Such as:
This was prompted by this depiction of Vincent’s costume to a masque party at Vassar! Are the roses a gas-mask? Clearly an image made by a thing that doesn’t worry about having to breathe. CHILLING.
Or:
The prompt was, Poet sits in Café de la Rotonde in Paris with gamin and Princess Lointaine qualities, freckles, and Romantic hair. I guess I didn’t say the poet HAD to have a face or functional hands!
This was generated from Milford’s description of Vincent’s high school photo:
AHHH! THIS IS NOT A PERSON!! Again, that prompt was, The year is 1908, in Maine. 17-year-old girl is seated on a Roman bench. She wore two great hair ribbons, one at the back of her neck, one perched to the top of her head like a white mouth. … Her dress is of a flowered Persian lawn with a deep V-bodice trimmed with lace. … Her gaze is direct and unsmiling.
When I entered Vincent’s 19-year-old journal entry about what she would wear to meet her fantasy lover, I do like that the generator didn’t default to making the woman white! But … it didn’t make the human look quite right. It’s subtle but this is the Uncanny Valley:
Nightmare fuel: blurry claw-hands as a response to, “In the year 1914 a 24-year-old woman in two long red pigtails wears an afternoon dress of taupe satin the color of Violetish Gray. The skirt is long and Frenchily made with soft panniers at the side, which end in a row of buttons….”
I’m horrified but honestly offended that DALL-E generated this when I promoted it, “a 33-year-old poet …”
One of Vincent’s lovers took her on an Orientalist tour of Albania, and they played dress up.
Also DALL-E took “Byronic lover” a little too literally!
I’m not sure what I’m doing with these images, to tell the truth. For now, they make me laugh, and rest easy that at this very moment, AI is easy to detect.
Laura Eppinger 