This is a x-post from my patreon (where I posted a few more pics, coz they can't all fit in this post).
If you've checked out the House of Hellish Harlots website recently, you might have noticed it has a little bit more colour now.
My webdev skills are rudimentary at best (probably less, to be honest - when it comes to IT I'm more of the backend math model coding type). It looks vaguely okay on my laptop, but I haven't been able to test it for other devices. If it looks like ass on your display (rather than just garish - that's intentional! :D ), let me know.
The art is from the new viral AI art toy, WOMBO Dream, you might have seen floating around on social media. You can play with it here:
https://www.wombo.art/
You feed it some keywords or phrases, and it spits out an impressionist painting in a variety of different styles (I'm guessing they're using some kind of neural network and trained it on a massive art catalogue). Obviously, me being me, I fed it a bunch of filth and the results were... interesting.
Currently, the AI only really seems good for abstract and impressionist works. It seems fairly difficult to get anything resembling a human form out of it, with "house7" below being the closest I got. Most of the time it spits out a weird jumble of body parts and facial features that looks bad rather than weird or disturbing.
I like it more with buildings and room interiors. The lines are still 'off', but they're off in a way that looks weird and hallucinatory. Especially if you feed it conflicting terms such as "house" with "hellish" and "sexual pleasure"/"perversion". That results in the AI blurring the lush voluptuous curves painted by the old masters with the regular lines of a building, and resulting in something that's 'off' in an interesting and slightly perverse way. Perfect for the House of Hellish Harlots, which is more than it appears!
I'm not sure if the developers intended it as anything other than a fun toy, but it seems to me like a really good way to produce abstract art for album or book covers (especially for self-published authors). Looking up the guidelines for use, the people that made the app don't want people trying to sell the artwork, but seem okay with people using it as album/book covers. I don't know how long that will stay in place as I suspect other people will latch onto the usefulness fairly quickly.
In the meantime I thought some of these would make nice background art to brighten up the website. It's a nice interim fix to hold me over until I can get some proper artwork commissioned.
