Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Lately I've been helping develop a very cool sci-fi action game (in my highly biased opinion!) which includes working with the creative director on putting together a presentation deck to show publishers and others.

Inevitably we've been using Midjourney to create prototype images for the deck — which gave me a first-hand demonstration on the limitations of generative AI as a visualization tool.

One aspect of the game involves a sci-fi cyberpunk commando performing CPR on a fallen comrade. So something like this at right (image via Wikimedia commons), but, you know, science fiction-y, cyberpunk-y, and more commando-y.

Here's one of the first images we got:

OK this is super sexy, and I'm glad these two crazy kids found some time for love in an uncaring world. But that's not what we're looking for!

"Midjourney doesn't have like pics of combat medics / EMT workers doing mouth-to-mouth?" I asked the creative director.

"I'm trying! Seems to have a loophole in the no smut directive."

"So a prompt like 'imagine combat medic performing mouth-to-mouth on dying soldier' gets us bupkus?"

Actually no, it got us more than bupkus — or less, depending how you look at it. Because prompts like that took us straight into "Aliens, but porn" territory:

"Vasquez! Don't you die on me now! Not until I put my sweet sweet loving on you." 

Then the commandos gave up on CPR entirely and went right into a three-way:

And so on and so forth, Midjourney happily spitting out pics like this by the dozens or hundreds. I had assumed the platform would have trained on all the many actual CPT training video and images online but somehow it didn't — or it did, but those got drowned out by porn and gratuitous sexiness.

Eventually we found one or two images that more or less worked, but it took quite a bit of digging. Specifically over 50 tries generating four images each.

And in the end, I had to wonder if it might have been more cost-effective for better results to… you know, pay a Photoshop artist to spend 15 minutes adding sci-fi commando bit to that original Wikipedia image.

After all, generative AI programs are designed to produce the most mediocre results from the web. Or the sexiest!