Cartoonish Me

There are days when I get distracted when I should be working on my book. Maybe I should go back to my old manual typewriter.

You may have noticed that the past several blog posts that I've published are using AI-generated images. It's been so long since I've used my cameras that they're literally starting to gather dust.

I've been telling myself that because I'm temporarily retired (I expect to take a paying job later, this summer or fall) that I can go out and take photos anytime, but I've become a creature of habit where I get up, get showered and dressed, have breakfast, and then move over to my home office. I've been doing this for more than five years, since the start of the pandemic, and it's a tough habit to break.

I don't need to wait until the end of the day or the weekend to get out there.

Because I haven't been taking many photos, I don't have any to share in a blog post. So, when I've written a blog post, I have lately turned to ChatGPT to create something to help illustrate what I'm writing about.

Hence, the images of a person writing on a computer at a desk and of me, sitting in a chair and reading a book. When I created the latter image, it cracked me up so much that I wanted to create more, but because I had used up the number of images that Chat GPT would make in a day, I had to wait to do more.

I uploaded the 3-D cartoonish image of myself into the tool and asked it to create another image of the same man, but instead of sitting in a chair, reading a book, have him taking a picture with a Nikon D-SLR. On the first try, I got this:

Perfect! It's now my avatar for my Bluesky account.

I also thought I'd like a similar creation of me, kayaking, so I found a photo of me, wearing my expedition hat, and asked ChatGPT to use the photo to create a 3-D cartoon image of the man in a red kayak, on a river, with a forest in the background.

Here's what it gave me:

I don't think it looks very much like me but it's not bad. And something was missing.

I always wear sunglasses when I paddle, so I told the AI tool to add them to the image and keep everything else the same.

Much better.

I was going to use this final image as my avatar for my YouTube channel, but I think that viewers would rather see a face not hidden behind sunglasses, even if it is a computer-generated face. So, I used the one without sunglasses.

I may make more of these kind of images but I'll try not to become addicted. In the meantime, I should get back to writing my murder mystery.

Happy Thursday!