The Lamb and Dragon?

Some images to set the scene

After a particularly tiring few weeks, which are not leaving me in much of a state to write anything very profound, I spent an evening that I had planned to waste in front of Netflix doing something no more intellectually demanding, but quite fun: I put various ideas for the “Lamb and Dragon: Virtual Theology in the Pub” into an AI art generator. I thought some readers might enjoy the results - others, I fear, may consider it a complete waste of time, and may like to use the handy “filing” button at the top right of their keyboard - but in any case, here are a few.

First, I tried to get a lamb and dragon drinking together in the style of a Victorian ink drawing, but the AI only managed to merge the two creatures into a hideous hybrid. I managed to get it to generate the two separately, and hope to find a way of getting these two sitting together to form the main image on the site:

I wanted a few snaps of potential customers drinking together, hence the following:

The AI isn’t great at singular and plural, hence the multiple variants of G.K. Chesterton. I really wanted Sayers, Chesterton and Lewis, but again, it gave me weird hybrids of the three instead.

The “book club,” for book reviews, could be represented by something like the following, though AI seems to default to white males unless one specifies otherwise:

Should there be a music section (I might be brave enough to share some recorded performances one day), I’ve got a lamb on the old Joanna and a Victorian jukebox ready to deploy:

I did manage to make a convincing Pub Bore, ready for interminable monologues:

And finally, here’s external shot of the pub itself, replete with Morris dancers and, by happy coincidence, a church in the background:

My efforts to get samurai dancing with Morris men on an English parish green with cricketers in the background proved singularly unsuccessful. Whether that it is a limitation of the AI or its human operator, I do not know. At least this is responsive to human input, rather than reconfiguring our minds through tailor-made advertisements and all my usual Luddite bugbears. If you are interested in turning your text into images, you can try it at Night Café Studio.