Ummm … no, this is not the Hubbard you are looking for. You gotta read the rest to earn that reward … also so I can be forgiven for crafting that totally clickbait headline. I am your host here at PseudoScientology.us, Imhotep. And just for full disclosure, Imhotep wasn’t actually a Pharoah like I make him out to be here (for you History fact-checkers). And the face is from my senior year at college (circa 1970). Yeah, yeah … so I’m as old as the pyramids. Whatever.
“Look upon my works ye mighty, and despair.”
Just kidding … that’s from my buddy Percy Bysshe Shelley
and his sonnet, “Ozymandias.”
What we have here is good old Photoshop, not AI.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is not only impacting industry, education, politics, and journalism. It is also entering Earth’s atmosphere at spaceship velocity in a new era of AI-generated art. AI technologies are creating an entirely new generation of artists … like me, Imhotep, your host at PseudoScientology.us.
The biggest concern, though, is how intrusive the new technology is becoming amidst the artist community. The art is good. In fact, it’s “scarily good.“
Artificial intelligence is getting scarily good. Among other abilities, AI art engines like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Imagen can take an arbitrary text description and create original artwork that fits the prompt. Their images range from simple to dizzyingly complex, from concrete to abstract, from cartoonish to photorealistic. In at least one case, AI-generated art won first place in a competition.
…these art engines have an uncanny intelligence. They can match human beings, imagination for imagination, giving form and shape to any notion we can conceive of. Some even seem to have a sense of humor.
Human artists and graphic designers are worried—rightfully so—that they’ll lose their jobs to these programs.
Taking the country by storm … New York Times in 2022, “A.I.-Generated Art Is Already Transforming Creative Work.”
In the past few months, A.I.-based image generators like DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have made it possible for anyone to create unique, hyper-realistic images just by typing a few words into a text box.
These apps, though new, are already astoundingly popular. DALL-E 2, for example, has more than 1.5 million users generating more than two million images every day, while Midjourney’s official Discord server has more than three million members.
Literally, “It’s so easy a caveman could do it,” harkening back to GEICO Insurance when they began an advertising campaign featuring Neanderthal-like cavemen. At MakeUseOf.com, the point is illustrated (and I so nailed that pun!):
AI-generated art is any image created using a generative AI model. Usually, this involves entering some text—called a prompt—into an AI art generator.
These text-to-image systems use a range of complex technology such as deep learning algorithms and generative adversarial networks (GANs), with the end product being quite amazing. Using just a few words or sentences, the model can generate an image that represents your description.
Most text-to-image AI art generators work in the same way. All you need to do is enter a text prompt and watch the art come to life before your eyes. The results will appear quickly, sometimes in less than a minute, and from there you can download the image or choose to generate another set of images based on the first result.
As an ancient Egyptian, I was curious how this amazing technology could assist me in exposing the mysterious dark side of Scientology. Artificial intelligence did not fail me.
I asked the AI Art Generator to create some images
of L. Ron Hubbard as an Egyptian Pharoah.
My mind was literally “BLOWN.” (sort of like me when I got out of the cult in 1967. But my exit wasn’t nearly as cool as Marc Headley, as detailed in his book “Blown For Good” where he relates how he was run off the road on his motorcycle by the Scientologists who chased him down).
The pharaohs of ancient Egypt reigned supreme. They were regarded as both gods and political figures. The pharaohs were so important to their people that they were compared to Egyptian gods such as Horus and Osiris … and one obscure fellow named Xenu. Here are two official photos of one of Egypt’s most revered leaders, AmenHubbardtep III (11391 BC – 1353 BC).