30 Pop Culture Characters Get A Cute Makeover As Babies Thanks To AI Technology

Long gone are the days when you could only imagine what Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones would look like as a baby by dressing up your own toddler for Halloween. Thanks to AI-powered software, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, which has helped countless artists realize their wildest ideas with a few clicks of a mouse and hand-calibrated text prompts, we can see The Simpsons' characters as real human beings and a plethora of selfies by iconic figures.

With so many new images being generated every single day - to the tune of 20 million, according to WIRED - it begs the question why so many folks are so hyped up about playing around with AI these days? Well, it's simple, really: these text-to-image canvases of unlimited potential are churning out some seriously impressive things that's just begging to be admired.

The best part? These AI-generated images are totally unique. You won't find one that's an exact copy of the other (although, there's always a slight chance). They're constantly surprising us with new and unexpected patterns, also additional pairs of fingers, never seen before. To steal a phrase from WIRED's Kevin Kelly: "It’s a similar pleasure to exploring a video game world, or paging through an art book." We couldn't say it any better, even with the help of AI.

Of course, nowadays you can't spell (AI-generated) "Art" without some kind of controversy, it appears. Earlier this month, when a German photographer named Boris Eldagsen snatched the first place in the prestigious Sony World Photo Award contest, many were furious because his prizewinning photo was created with the help of 1s and 0s. Or DALL-E 2, to be precise. Thus becoming the first AI-generated photograph to win the award (which Eldagsen later refused to accept).

A similar uproar happened when in 2022 designer Jason Allen won Colorado State Fair's fine art competition with what appeared to be Midjourney-generated artwork enlarged and printed on canvas. It was the early days of AI-powered art making, and so these sorts of announcements took the world by surprise, splitting the public in two.

Milan Jaram, the digital artist known for more traditional digital art, and more recently for his AI experimentations, like the eerily realistic Simpsons' series, has a thing or two to say about the matter. "I do not call myself an AI artist and I do not use 'artist' or 'art' hashtags - I steer away from that controversy personally," he explained to Bored Panda via email. "This is because I am a traditional artist. In fact, my Instagram verification comes from being a professional artist since the '90s."

Like many traditional artists whose fundamental skills are deeply rooted in hand-drawn artwork, Milan believes that there's nothing wrong with the harmony between AI-generated stuff and traditional artistry. It just, so to speak, needs a little time and calibration - just like generating pictures via Midjourney and DALL-E.

"Remember, 'art' is subjective. A good example is an AI artist booth next to a traditional artist booth. If someone is going to buy the traditional artist's art, they will - whether the AI artist booth exists or not," explained Jaram."People are buying your art because they like your style. They put a value on it. In this scenario, there won't be very many people in an AI artist booth, and if there will - prices won't be high. The freedom to create via AI muddles any value it has."

To see what Milan means, one has to turn his/her/their heads to Mike Winkelmann, who's more widely known as 'Beeple'. A few years back, this digital wizard became part of art history books by selling his NFT art collection for an eye-watering sum of $69 million. And if only you didn't know any better, you could say that Beeple's art looks like something AI could spit out after a few days of good honest work.

But there you'd be wrong: Winkelmann said himself that for his most popular pieces he was using "Cinema 4D and mostly Octane", which is a 3D graphics render software dating back, well, before AI was making waves in the art world. And just like with AI-generated pictures, there was a time when 3D rendered imagery, such as the one used for video games and advertisements, wasn't considered worthy of the 'art' label, too.