Visualizing Roland

As I said in yesterday's post, how I find it a challenge to visualize the characters in my books, and how I asked ChatGPT to create the detectives in my novel, Dark Water, based on my descriptions, I was finally able to visualize inspectors Mickey Calloway and Erin Hayes, which has actually helped me develop their characters more.

Thanks, AI.

For fun, whilst creating that post, I uploaded images of singer-songwriter Midge Ure and of myself, from when I lived in Korea, and asked ChatGPT to merge the images to come up with Roland Axam, the central character to my novel, Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary. Here's what it came up with:

Image: ChatGPT

Not bad. Not bad at all.

Though the film noir feeling that Ure's portrait for his The Gift album cover suits him perfectly, I wasn't feeling it for Roland (though, as my novel tells, he has a dark past). So I asked ChatGPT to add colour to the image and use the background from the photo of me.

Image: ChatGPT

And while it still looks like the person in the first image, I felt the face was too round for Roland (it captured the roundness of my face perfectly) and it had also created somewhat of a double chin for the character, something that I definitely didn't have in 1998. So, I told the AI tool to slim the face and lose the double chin.

Image: ChatGPT

I can actually see this as Roland Axam. Well done.

I can finally stop visualizing either myself or Midge Ure when I think about my character, who will make an appearance in a book, someday.

Happy Wednesday!