Overthinking It: Google Image Search vs. AI Image Generator

"Here's Johnny!"

For most people, that brief phrase conjures a sole image:  Jack Nicholson's maniacal Jack Torrance furiously hacking through a door to reach his terror-stricken wife.  A Google search of the utterance, with no further context, yields dozens of images of The Shining's most iconic scene before a single shot of the phrase's originator, Ed McMahon, ever appears.  For decades, any reasonably intelligent person has been quickly able to find a photo of the unhinged, ax-wielding Torrance.

But until lately, unless one was a Photoshop ace, it was difficult to obtain images that address more hypothetical topics, images that answer questions such as: "How would Edie Sedgwick look if she were alive today?", "What would the love child of Scarlett Johansson and Bob Hope look like?", and "What if Angela Lansbury had played the lead role in the Rambo series?".  Fortunately, recent developments in AI software have made short work of realistically rendering such subjects.  

Convincing AI-generated images

Left: Princess Diana, were she alive today

Right:  A-lister Will Smith as an ordinary fast food hireling

With this in mind, we decided to approach an AI image generator with a far simpler directive:  just show us film and television classics featuring their original stars.  If AI can spawn surprisingly lifelike visualizations of highly speculative subject matter, then it must certainly be able to churn out rigorously accurate reproductions of images that already exist.  Our first prompt of "The Shining, Jack Nicholson, here’s Johnny" seemed like a no-artificial-brainer; even Jeeves would have been able to help.    

But instead of simply regurgitating easily located stills of our requested subjects, the AI presented a string of bizarre, often disturbing images.  Each contains identifiable elements of what we sought (some to a greater extent than others), but the overall compositions are surreal and unsettling. Certain motifs—diseased eyes, doppelgängers, grotesquely gnarled hands—recur several times, and occasionally the AI seemed to utilize random features from actors other than those we specified (for instance, the AI's purported Jack Nicholson displays a correctly configured left eyebrow but possesses a honker of Harrison Fordian angles and proportions).  We have presented our findings below, each in a side-by-side comparison with the Google-sourced image that inspired our AI prompt. 

  

Jack Nicholson in The Shining

Gloria Swanson in Sunset Blvd.

Sigourney Weaver in Alien

Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show

Bob Barker on The Price is Right

Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune

John Cleese in Fawlty Towers

Mary Tyler Moore in The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss in Seinfeld

Kelsey Grammer in Frasier

EXTENDED FEATURE:  Scenes from The Golden Girls

IN-DEPTH LOOK:  Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy

The Crabnox Insta-title

Have you completed a film but stalled out on creating a title? If so, your worries are over. With its new INSTA-TITLE, CRABNOX makes that most difficult aspect of movie production easy. Simply take any word from the first box and any word from the second box, and you have the perfect title. The word banks contain vague entries that can signify almost anything, which means that regardless of your film's genre, the INSTA-TITLE will give you an appropriate appellation.  

Ready for the sequel? Take your film's title, add "2:" to the end, and follow the steps above with the word banks below.  For more important sequels, we recommend using "II:" instead.

Here are some samples to get you started:

Unintended Sacrifices 

Unintended Sacrifices 2: The Other Side of Madness 

Secret Moments  

Secret Moments 2: On the Verge of Tomorrow

Forbidden Vengeance

Forbidden Vengeance II:  Brink of Insanity

The Snuggle Bear Found Murdered

AP-In the early hours of the morning, beloved anthropomorphic detergent spokesmammal the Snuggle Bear was found brutally murdered in an alley in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. While authorities have few leads, the slaying may have resulted from a drug deal gone awry. According to a family friend, the Snuggle Bear became addicted to crystal meth and cocaine after he lost his personal fortune financing "Alien vs the Snuggle Bear," his big-screen debut, which proved a massive critical and commercial failure. "He was a broken bear," the friend confided. "When he couldn't make it in Hollywood, drugs became his only escape." At this time, no suspects have been named. The Snuggle Bear was 52 bear years old.

Above: at the pinnacle of his career, the Snuggle Bear was one of the world's highest paid ursine media personalities.

Above: the slain corpse of the Snuggle Bear.