Are you good at recognizing faces?

Here’s a series of video quizzes that I’ve created where the challenge is to identify famous (and infamous) celebrities, politicians, and historical figures that have been re-imagined into fictional middle-school yearbook photos. Can you guess them all?

It should be obvious (I hope) that none of the children depicted in these quizzes are real.

Like so many others in recent months, I’ve been exploring the intriguing, creative, and yes – very creepy potential of artificial-intelligence-based “text-to-image” art generators such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion. In case you’re not already familiar with MidJourney, Stable Diffusion, or the glut of other similar text-to-image programs, these are amazing machine-learning technologies that challenge the borders of science fiction by magically creating images from simple text statements called prompts.

These programs enable anyone with a keyboard and an idea to create their own amazing artwork without any substantive knowledge of art, design or computer coding. With a single phrase, you can create incredible imagery of literally anything that is imaginable.

I’ve had the pleasure of experimenting with some of these programs for several months now. While these programs are still in their early days, they can already produce impressive results that (subjectively) rival – or at least mimic some of the best art created by humans. While the results are not always perfect, they are overwhelmingly impressive.

Here’s a very small sample of the thousands of images that I’ve created over the past few months (do note that corrective Photoshop work has been applied to most of them).

Artificial intelligence is beginning to impact almost every aspect of our lives, from how we interact with technology to how we interact with each other. Needless to say, this is both exciting and worrisome at the same time. I could write a long, fear-mongering diatribe on the ethical and legal ramifications of where AI-generated art and artificial intelligence itself are leading us, but you could just hit up Google and read the thousands of articles that already exist about the topic. Just know that, me … I’m a fan and am eagerly looking forward to all of the wonders and worries to come.

Hope you enjoy the quizzes.