500,000 JPGs

And No Plans

A recent post on the Stable Diffusion subreddit struck upon an inadvertently hilarious nerve of truth for describing the current AI zeitgeist. The Reddit user had simply asked what everybody was doing with their jpgs.

“I have generated well over 200,000 images and I have no clue what I am supposed to do with them? There has to be a use for that many images except I wouldn’t know what it is. Seems like I just like to generate images to just collect them then do nothing with them after that.”

I suppose my amusement at this is just imagining a guy sitting at his computer generating images and saving them with no sense of why he is doing it at all, but doing it enough to accumulate 200,000 jpgs anyway.

For some folks this might read as a call to disillusionment, but no. This guy ends his post by declaring that “there is no way this Stable Diffusion AI stuff is just a fad and will eventually fade away before we know it. It’s here to stay, apparently. Maybe even for ever.”

I’m not linking to the post (and Reddit has rules against that anyway). But I keep thinking about this guy. I don’t want to mock him because, issues with AI notwithstanding, there’s nothing wrong with making pictures for fun or for people to play with images without any intention beyond seeing what happens.

But I also love the idea that there’s a new type of guy, a guy who is making images but has no clue why. It’s almost as if the images are just kind of happening to him. All he knows is that the hard drive keeps filling up.

The music video for “500,000 JPGs” is a caricature of that impulse, I guess. It’s an attempt to distill that sense of joyous pointlessness about AI image generators that you find among fans like these. A kind of folk song about hard drive space and our compulsions toward algorithms. There’s something vaguely John Henry about it, but if John Henry was just laying train tracks out of boredom and the machine still somehow managed to kill him.

It’s also a fairly relatable impulse, as an artist working with this tool, to just have no clue what to do with the things I make with it. I have a fairly direct purpose for using these systems: I want to know how they work and how to break them. Along the way I’ve amassed a number of images, and not all of them turn into pieces or artworks. So I get it.

I also think the problem is absurd, and speaks to just how rapidly we’ve eroded the meaning and power of synthetic images. It seems to me like we’re on the cusp of a generative-AI ennui.

The track’s lyrics are my own, the music is generated with the new Suno AI model. At the end you will hear the genuine sound of a diffusion model collapse, because I kept pushing the noise aspect of the prompt. Sorry it’s not pleasant, but glitching Suno is the most interesting thing I can do with it.

The video is made with Runway’s Gen3, which is a fairly remarkable video generation model. Notably, the same glitching techniques used for Stable Diffusion and Midjourney work on it, but they move. I’ve posted a few early experiments with glitching Gen3 to my Instagram, if you’re interested.

I’m sure I’ll have more critical reflections on them both in the near future.

The “500,000 Jpgs” video is not glitched so much as just a desire to see what happens when you ask a model to depict scenes of people being violent against computers. All of the images are the result of being prompted with “office riot,” “people destroying computers,” that kind of thing. The disconnect between the model’s seeming inability to depict violence and its circumscribing of that violence results in what mostly comes off as a dance party where computers explode, and that is good enough for me.

Lyrics below. Hope you dig the track. I needed to take a break from the heavy lifting of the past few weeks, so I hope you find this as ridiculous as I did.

500,000 JPGs

I've got 20,000 jpgs and no plans
I've 30,000 jpgs and no ideas 
for what to do with them 
I've got 40,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
what do you guys do with all these pictures

100,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no ideas for what to do now 
100,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no ideas for what to do now 

I've got 50,000 jpgs 
and no plans 
I've got 60,000 jpgs 
and a new hard drive 
but no ideas 
I've got 100,000 jpgs 
and something's off 
something feels empty 
I've got 200,000 jpgs 
and something's wrong 
I feel unsatisfied

500,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no ideas and no ideas 
600,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no ideas and no ideas 

700,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no ideas what do you guys do? 
800,000 jpgs on a hard drive 
and no idea what do artists do? 
900,000 jpgs and still not satisfied 
still no idea what do I do 
what do you guys do 

1 million jpgs you'll never see 
1 million jpgs just for me 
1 million jpgs I'll never glance at again 
1 million jpgs what do we do 
what do we do now