AI-generated Vintage Computers that don't exist

[tinsmith]

I've been having a bit of fun using MidJourney to generate images of some computers that don't exist. I find they have a delightfully familiar, yet utterly alien quality to them. At first glance, they're easily identified as a computer of some kind, but a closer look at the detail reveals funky technology, the purpose of which we can only guess at. Naturally, this makes my imagination go a bit wild.

The images are of the upscaled, high resolution quality that MidJourney offers.

For those that don't know, MidJourney is one of many "artificial intelligence" image generators that is based on the Stable Diffusion model. It runs exclusively in Discord servers, and you get about 75 images for free to try before they start asking for money. If anyone is interested in playing around with it, PM me for an invite to my personal server, or I can tell you how to set it up on your own.

My personal favorite is vintage-portable-computer-6.png. It's got this IMSAI 8080 thing going on with a hacked up Telegames/Commodore 64 thing attached, out in the desert for some reason?

 

[3lectr1c]

Number 1 looks like it tried to write kaypro. Number one looks like it tried to write heathkit?

 

[whartung]

These are great. Love the keyboards.

The portable is borderline tech-punk.

 

[tinsmith]

Number 1 looks like it tried to write kaypro. Number one looks like it tried to write heathkit?

That happened because I was including brand names as descriptors in the prompts It sometimes helps control the direction it goes a little, but it definitely can't write. Since it does not parse language, the results include a bunch of strange gibberish if text is involved. Here's a good example of what it does to text when I was trying to use SCP descriptions as prompts.

 

[3lectr1c]

Funny how it can understand the letters but it can’t put them together. I wonder if they’ll get the language model and image model working together in the future to fix this.

 

[whartung]

I wonder if they’ll get the language model and image model working together in the future to fix this.

It's arguable that right now they're doing this on purpose. They have the language models, but much like they make the "people" not look like, well, "people", they're...uh...consciously trying to not use real words in images. That's a guess, I don't know.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

These are great. Love the keyboards.

The keyboards are the biggest giveaway these are AI generated. You can see how the AI doesn't really understand what a "key" is, it just thinks of them as a certain kind of texture object and makes mistakes trying to tile them sensibly. They do the same thing with human fingers, which can be pretty disturbing.(*)

(* Clearly they're keyboards meant for AI-generated hands?)

 

[Pickelhaube808]

Love the keyboard on the KAYXIRO. The whole machine looks like a mix between a radio and a lunchbox.

 

[tinsmith]

They do the same thing with human fingers, which can be pretty disturbing.

Hah! I think you might be on to something, Eudimorphodon. I have definitely seem some horrors and borderline Uncanny Valley stuff during my adventures with AI image generation, but he hands still weird me out, a bit. Funny thing is, all the human artists I know also complain that hands are just difficult to draw in general, so I guess it tracks that a machine fed billions of human-generated images would have trouble with that.

The whole machine looks like a mix between a radio and a lunchbox

The colors really do it for me. One of my favorite real keyboards I've encountered is the one on the Otrona Attache I'm current working on. Beats the heck out of the plain-black-tray style of modern keyboards.