Gaze with me upon the horror that is AI's attempts to create a cute clumsy baby giraffe

Welcome, new readers! It seems like a lot of people hate running as much as I do, which is extremely validating. This is a safe space. You don’t have to pretend that horrible things are fun here. This is a place where I sometimes rant about things that suck, like kids’ birthday parties, but mostly I try to write about things I really enjoy, like Lego flowers and great video games and feminist Greek myth retellings. And sometimes I like to make fun of AI, like I did here:

For this short Friday post, I want to go a little more in that direction and share with you the absolute nightmare fuel I witnessed when I tried to create a picture of a clumsy newborn giraffe for Tuesday’s post. First I tried to embed a gif, but it was too big, so then I asked “What could possibly go wrong with trying to use Substack’s generative AI tool?” and, well…

sorry, baby giraffe, you’re attached to your mom at the head somehow?

Whoops. Let’s try that again.

what in god’s name am I even looking at here

Perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, Substack isn’t an AI company, so it probably doesn’t have the best models. This isn’t their main focus. She should have tried to use Dall-E instead.” Reader, I did try that. First I tried Meta AI, because, well, family etc. It did… fine. The giraffes were either cute but not clumsy, or neither cute nor clumsy and their spots were weirdly fractal-looking.

I then tried to ask it to make the giraffe “even clumsier” but accidentally wrote “slumsier” and it created these hilarious but sadly not relevant images:

Incredible work.

At that point I went over to ChatGPT. On my first attempt Dall-E was totally unable to generate a giraffe with a normal number of legs:

Whoops, that’s not right! Let’s try again:

No, that’s worse.

That first Dall-E giraffe kind of looks like it has boobs, right? Which brings me to my next attempt with Dall-E. I tried a fresh question, and it created this adorable cartoon character I would love to write a children’s book about:

SO CUTE but I asked it to make the image more realistic and it gave me this:

Still cute, but not actually more realistic. So then I asked for a photorealistic version like you’d see in National Geographic, and it gave me this:

At that point, I realized that asking for more realism was just leading to the baby giraffe having progressively bigger breasts and more eyeliner for some reason, and I hated it. So I decided to go with the blanket monstrosity I shared in the original post and just lean into the horror/absurdity.

Thank you for joining me on this journey. I’m glad you’re here.