in·spired

/inˈspī(ə)rd/ adjective filled with the urge or ability to do or feel something creative or meaningful

I’ve never been one to consider myself a glass-half-full kind of person.

I’m more realist, more strategist, less optimist.

But when you spend some time reading social media comments, it can change your perspective. Turns out I am far more optimistic, or perhaps just happier to spend what precious time I have in this life on being something more productive than a troll.

The online groups I’ve joined are focused on sharing interests and hobbies and learning things. Of late, I’ve been a quiet lurker in several different AI groups, where I read about all of the cool things are people are doing.

So, one quiet afternoon, I opted to dig in and see if I could create my own version of magic using Flux AI: Text to Image (and training my LoRA). The fellow I follow posts thorough YouTube videos on how he creates some of the things he’s showcased online, so after watching for a few minutes, I signed up for a fal.ai account through Github. In full transparency, I have absolutely no idea what any of that means, but I can follow instructions pretty well when I want to.

The AI bots and I have gotten pretty comfortable over the past year, and my prompt writing skills have come a long way. The bots have also gotten better and better if you know how to interact with them. For example, I want to make pinwheels for an upcoming event and I just told it what ingredients I had and asked it to give me a recipe - which it did. So long Google and sorting through countless food blogs.

Back to Flux. I spent the first half hour building my LoRA using about 30 photos, and then played for several hours creating literally hundreds of AI-generated images. Some were absolutely fantastic, but others…well, we are all learning. That’s one thing I learned a while back, if you keep a log of your prompts and notes on the settings and outcomes, it helps you learn along with the machine. Once I built a critical mass of business-style images, I wondered what else I could do.

I uploaded an image of my favorite painting (Rain Princess) into Perplexity along with details about the artist (Leonid Afremov). It created a series of prompts for me to use in Flux. Fair to say, the bots were appropriately inspired and did a lovely job creating something new yet reminiscent.

As we say farewell to this year, I would be remiss not to share that even the darkest moments had profound purpose in the journey.

That’s inspired.

December 31, 2024