Trained On My Drawings: Backyard Spaceships and Post Planet Astronaut Love

In 2022 and 2023, I experimented with training AI image generating models with my own dataset of blind contour drawings. from 2002. I used RunwayML in the cloud and created my own checkpoints for Stabile Diffusion and challenged the AI to try to make things with only those references. I asked it to build spaceships using only the reference drawings from my drawings of trucks and construction equipment. The result was that it added wheels and tank treads to spaceships and made them look like the spaceships were made out of old farm equipment… which they were!

I also used the dataset of naked people and had these image generators try and make astronauts out of the naked people. I was also going through some eco-anxiety with the awareness that we are nearing the end of our species on the planet. First I made images of people trying to be friends in space and intimate but in the awkwardness of spacesuits. Then I had them doing ordinary things in space, like checking email and playing video games. The third component of this series was the realization that we won’t need to be in space if we wear space suits on earth, so I challenged the image generator to make images of astronauts doing ordinary things like gardening and riding a bike and playing volleyball.