Did you ever dance with the Devil?

 

Is it a coincidence that Trump dyes his hair (and face) red and his followers all where red? Could he be, in fact, the devil? I doubt it because I've always assumed the Devil was fairly intelligent. He is supposed to have been a fallen angel that got sick of serving in heaven and decided it was better to rule in hell than serve in heaven.

As I come closer to retirement and ruling my own life, I can relate. Not that my job was comparable to serving in heaven. But it is a hell of a lot nicer to work for yourself. Not that I will ever truly do whatever I like without someone wagging their finger at me. 

Gemini Cricket helped me with this "Dance with the Devil" image. In some ways I like it's stuff better than Artie over at Ideogram. Gemini is more abstract and deep whereas Artie can be pretty damned literal. I like this Devil (though it looks very much like all of the cow images Gemini seems to spit out no matter what image I ask for. At least this one is red.

I was reading this e-mail spam from a British guy teepublic.com suggested I read to learn how to design t-shirts. He has been dissing on AI because it threatens people who "create their own quality designs." Now he is is admitting that AI can produce some pretty bitchin' designs in a fragment of the time the "designers" do. And he begrudgingly admits that the designs are nothing without a good idea. But he did raise the concern that you can't copyright AI designs so anyone can steal them from you if you post them in your storefronts.

I asked ChattyGPT about this and it pontificated for awhile about it is a gray area. If you just ask AI to barf up a design and you post it, technically you can't say it is yours. But if you give fairly detailed instructions and alter the designs to meet your expectations, then technically you can say it is your design and potentially can copyright it.

Duh. That's what I have been saying from the beginning. Art AI still takes a great deal of work to direct it and get it into a form that makes a great design. I don't even ask Gemini for headlines most of the time. It takes me so long to clean up text that I've taken to just asking for images and then adding my own headlines. 

So I do a lot of dancing with the devil to create my designs. And they are all my ideas (even if they are based on movie lines). 

See, I was able to repurpose a spare Grinning Reaper who truly does see dead people.  And to give credit to the "Sixth Sense" where the "I see dead people" line came from in the first place I created this design.

It's a pity that there are probably generations of people now who don't get the reference. It is the downside of being old and working with my version of popular culture. I do try and keep up with thing that are trending but I have to admit things change very rapidly in the age of Tik Tok and the Internet and many of the trends so seem very stupid to me.

I mentioned I go through the 6 dollar t-shirt site periodically and ask ChattyGPT what some of the t-shirts that I don't get mean.  That's where I found out about a meme that was trending some time ago that I sort of knew about but didn't pay any attention to.

Doge was a meme that  featured a Shiba Inu dog from Japan called Kabosu, It was posted by a Japanese kindergarten teacher. "Doge" was intentionally misspelled (this was before AI Art) and the memes all had words like "So," and "Very." This was all back in 2013 and I just now found out about it. The doge is "so very" dead now. Ironically, my son had a "Doge" phone case for a couple of years and I just thought he like Shiba Inus. 

Oh well, may be I'll catch up to the trends before I die.