Suzanne Hesta’s photos of old ladies in nightclubs are the piggyback for everyone who thinks older ladies should be invisible. It’s too bad the ladies don’t exist in real life. They are generated by an artificial intelligence program. Hæstad is an Esmod trained designer with a shoemaker’s certificate, loves working with textiles and wallpaper and has worked in digital production of prints. The head is always full of ideas.
I love learning new things, tech hacks and exploring how different things work. I have a typical bubble head, she says, full of ideas.
I love learning new things, technical tricks, and software
– Susan Hestad, designer
It was almost by chance that she came across AI Midjourney – a program where you can create “fake art” via artificial intelligence software that creates images from text descriptions. After studying some YouTube tutorials, she got the idea.
– Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night at three or four o’clock and can’t sleep. What am I doing then? Yes, you surf the Internet, you laugh.
– I spent the nights for a while sitting in online sales in Japan and bought a set of kimono, but I couldn’t keep up for a long time. Then I thought well, all this AI stuff that people talk about so much, maybe I should try something like that?
That’s when I found AI Midjourney. Then fantasy caught fire.
[ Raserer behandlingstilbud for folk med spiseforstyrrelser ]
Inner circle of friends
– We have a club called the “Get together, go out on tour and theatre” club. Then I sat there alone fantasizing at night, and thought: What will we look like when we get old?
I typed in a handful of select keywords: AbFab, 80-year-old, tough tattooed ladies in a New York nightclub. Accordingly, the program produced a series of images that can make most people face aging with optimism.
“Yeah, I have to say I thought it was very funny, a great picture of what we might think we’d look like in a few years, when so many people like to get tattoos,” she smiles.
A bit scary
Susan Hestad sees the show as a fun pastime, and it’s not at all problem-free.
In these days of so much fake news, such software is scary, because you can produce images of people and events that never happened. As a newspaper reader who swears by old-school paper and materials, I see clear challenges for digital media of the future when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence. Because – in the end, who gets to decide what’s right and wrong? Says.
A funny detail is that the program faces the same challenge as real people:
– You may remember the controversy that took place in artist circles a few years ago about the ability to draw by hand? Susan Hestad says.
One of the hardest things to draw when it comes to anatomy are human hands and feet. It was often a measure of how skilled a painter was.
– Well, artificial intelligence software faces the same challenge as us humans, and it certainly cannot produce a normal human hand. And maybe that’s also a little reassuring, she smiles.
“Web specialist. Lifelong zombie maven. Coffee ninja. Hipster-friendly analyst.”
