In June '22 I minted a 10-edition NFT for 1tez on typed.art with the simple phrase "IOU 1 JPEG". 10 Unique 1/1 characters were then released & airdropped to their rightful heirs as editions of the text were collected. These 10 Characters formed the [IOU], or the Institute Of the Unknown.
Back in June, my primary method of working with AI-generated art was a web program called Snowpixel. Rather than use it to specifically generate humanoid beings or characters, I would take the weird and wonderful abstract results it produced from my whimsical (read: nonsensical) text prompts and overlay & combine them in Photoshop, ala "Frankenstein's collage" if you will.
This meant that rather than just run with whatever the AI provided, I was taking it a stage further, splicing it to make something unique. Then I would blur the background region to make the piece stand out.
The example image below is of The Oracle.
However, since then AI-generated art has come on in literal leaps and bounds. The results achievable from the likes of Dalle-2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion are leagues ahead of their predecessors, and the tools they come with allow you to tweak, edit and play to your heart's content. All of the collaging can now take place right within the AI software.
So it only felt right to see what one of the newer kids on the block thought of the members of the institute. Taking each artwork, I used the characters as starting reference images in Stable Diffusion 1.5 via Playground AI, using words and prompts relating to the role and personality of each character, with a good few variations/filters thrown in. The results were pretty wild...
It wasn't long before I had a whole new remastered cast of characters, and it seemed only fitting to mint a 1/1 of each of these new variants and airdrop them to the current corresponding holders of the originals.
The full crew and their new stable counterparts can be seen below, as well as on the Objkt collection here.
Now I really need to get back to writing the lore behind the IOU, and each character's introduction! Next up is the Alchemist. Stay tuned.