Using Generative AI to combat Aphantasia (with freebies)

 A lot has changed since my last post, including the development of genAI. Lately, I have been exploring the use of genAI as a therapeutic tool. I have taken journal entries and turned them into poems and songs, being able to hear your emotions reflected back to you in music is incredibly powerful! I have also been playing around with using genAI art to create images that help me to see the beauty within me.

Now I know that the artistic world is divided on this issue, but there is no putting the genie back in the bottle, genAI is here to stay. Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School who specialises in workplace technology and genAI said "AI won't replace humans, but humans with AI will replace humans without AI".

I am not going to tell you how to feel about art created by genAI. I love using these tools because my imagination gland doesn't work very well. There is a condition known as aphantasia which is where a person is unable to visualise mental images. People with aphantasia can still think and understand concepts, but they don't experience visual imagery in the same way as people without the condition. The image below shows the spectrum. When I imagine an apple I am usually around a three on the scale below, I have seen enough apples that I can draw one from memory. However, if I try and manifest an original idea, I am a four at best. I can describe in words but that doesn't translate visually to an image on the page.

Enter genAI. As a wordsmith I can write a rich description of what I want to see and let the AI agent pull together a starting point, from there I can tweak it until I am happy with the result. I can then use that artwork as a reference photo to create my own original art, or I can print it and use it in junk journals or collage, which is what I intend to share with you.

I am using Copilot, which is the free AI agent by Microsoft, and currently also subscribed to Dzine, which is a paid subscription model. These images are free and high enough quality for home use but not high enough quality for commercial use. This means you are more than welcome to use any of these for your own reference, or home use but as these are not in a high resolution I don't recommend on-selling any of these. 

This series was done on Copilot, using variations of the prompt: an artistic version of a mouse sitting underneath a toadstool, the cap of the toadstool acts to protect the mouse from the rain, the mouse is wearing peasant style clothing, made of natural fibres, rustic and warm, the mouse is wearing an adventurer's backpack, with raindrops falling and the mushroom being a fly agaric