A couple of my images have been featured in a gallery of images created with Midjourney and Dall-E 2 on FT Magazine.
I made the following point in the comments:
Worth mentioning, a steampunk parrot in itself is totally kitsch, and would be just more of the sort of generic eye candy that you see a lot on Midjourney instagram accounts.
Some background to how these images evolved..
I saw the phrase “stochastic parrot” (taken from a paper, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜) in the previous article, and this idea really resonated with me.
I then read the paper and one of the critiques of it.
The steampunk parrot image represents a kind of echo chamber, where generic images are reflected in infinite recursion, amplifying kitsch tropes. Steampunk and cyberpunk are 2 of the most common of these tropes, and something about the repetitive banality and conformity of that I find unsettling.
The woman seeng herself reflected as a parrot represents another aspect of the echo chamber in light of issues of representation, as well as addressing the idea of how there is a desire to look into a fantasy mirror. Also our obsession with beauty, and how that is determined.
When I first made the prompt it became clear that unless otherwise specified, the Midjourney corpus will almost always return images of white people, and to just accept and reinforce this outcome would be irresponsible. This is one of the things the paper was addressing in the first place.