AI Midjourney Images “Stairway to Heaven”

This modern era of GPU-accelerated AI applications have their benefits. Pulling useful information out of mountains of raw data, alerting users to driving hazards, or just keeping an eye on bee populations are all helpful. Lately there has been a rise in attempts at producing (or should that be curating?) works of art out of carefully sculpted inputs.

One such AI art project is midjourney, which can be played with via a Discord integration bot. That bot takes some textual input, then “dreams” with it, producing sometime uncanny, often downright disturbing images.

You can have a tinker with it for free, for a short while, but there is monthly cost if you want to use it ‘for real’ whatever that means. YouTuber [Daara] has been feeding the lyrics from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” into it, producing a video tour of the resulting outputs for your perusal.

Just for the sake of — you know — science, we fed some Hackaday author bio details into midjourney to see what popped. Can you guess which authors match the images?

Engineering nerds like us probably aren’t the best judges of whether or not this counts as art, but for making interesting images out of a rough concept it’s certainly entertaining at least. What happens with mundane inputs, like “circuit board hammer drill”?

Led Zeppelin have been around a while, with some interesting tributes, such as this C64 demoscene hack that streams a song straight off the humble floppy and doesn’t sound half bad. And if this whole AI image stuff is familiar, we did cover another application, stable diffusion just the other week.