An experimental horror ARG is testing the boundaries of AI art

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We are currently living in Year Zero, which started on February 10th, 2022. There is a period of extreme dystopia, where a fundamentalist religious government is in charge of an omnipotent Bureau of Morality and there is a strange phenomenon called "The Presence" that can be seen across the country.

Year Zero was an alternate reality game that was part of the album of the same name. It was designed by 42 Entertainment, the same company that created Last Call Poker and I Love Bees. The game began in February of 2007, at the end of a golden age for commercial ARGs, which included an audi campaign, ARG companions to major tv shows, and an interactive clothing company. Trent Reznor was frustrated for Year Zero because most of the time these were marketing projects. He said that buying a record is the art form.

The most evocative Year Zero imagery was taken by Rob Sheridan, the band's long time art director. Sheridan was no longer working with NIN. There were images hidden in song files and cryptic messages on T-shirts. These were the days before mainstream social media was seen as a vehicle for fiction by the public.

The Volstof Institute for Interdimensional Research (VIIR) posted a mysterious message on March 29th, 2022, followed by eerie images of a forgotten lab. This was the beginning of the experiment that would eventually lead to the creation of the ARG. VIIR invites players to look at the documents taken from the fictional institute. The whole place was destroyed when Volstof tried to communicate with strange beings through electronic hardware. A group of people are trying to figure out what happened to the lab and its location.

When he was invited to the early alpha phase of a new art service called Midjourney, the idea for VIIR was born. He was talking to the Midjourney bot for lack of a better way to explain it, and it was generating stuff that felt like it was coming out of his imagination. He was excited by the new frontier and wanted to figure out how he could use it. VIIR is one of the first projects to harness artificial intelligence in a meaningful way, and it is the first to show what Midjourney could do.

Image: Rob Sheridan

Image: Rob Sheridan

There are eerie snapshots of bone growths emerging from stereos and delicate structures in the VIIR documents. Azathrys likes to mimic the human skull, while Drurigu is drawn to the synthesizer that behaves like a fungus. Volstof's notes and snippets from scientists' journals are usually included with these. The images are stamped with a code of text and numbers.

At the time, he felt like he was using the software the wrong way. He noticed that most Midjourney users were more interested in art and beauty than anything else. The early days of Andy Warhol are what most of the artists on it are referring to. I was wondering how I could get this thing to give me a mangled body with parts from another world and make it look like a picture. He used trial and error to find the right recipe of words that would create consistency.

Absolutely stunning looks at the #MetGala2022. I know it was a controversial decision, but I think opening a portal to Hell was exactly what this year's event needed to spice things up. pic.twitter.com/hgtYQOqEwr

— Rob Sheridan (@rob_sheridan) May 2, 2022

He felt weird about the results. He admits that he didn't know what to do with it because it looked like someone else's artwork. I wrote something in my head, and it gave me a beautiful piece of art, but I don't feel like this is something that I can claim on any level. He is aware of the fear that artists have about robots taking their jobs and has come to see Midjourney as another tool that can be used to create entirely new art. You can describe what you want to see in whole sentences if you use a simple /text command. The early days of art were dominated by fake Zdzisaw Beksiski paintings and artificial intelligence.

The annual Met Gala is considered by some to be an out-of-touch circus of class elitism by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A thread called " Events From Hell" was filled with body horror takes on pop culture. Midjourney was freaked out by the post and their response was to say that it is not a platform for gore or shocking content.

The terms that made VIIR possible were added to Midjourney's banned terms. Some people began to feel the squeeze of Midjourney's restriction of the words "nudes", "erotica", and "seductive" As the company admits that there's immense potential for harmful biases, it stirred discussion about "wholesome" imagery as a default.

According to David Holz, co-founder of Midjourney, their image creation policies must adhere to the rules of Discord, which don't allow "real media depicting gore, excessive violence, or animal harm, especially with the intent to harass or shock others." He says that banning words is a good way to go. We are still exploring better, more subtle, and expressive solutions in the future.

The DALL-E 2 has more restrictions than Midjourney. New users have to do an hour-long video chat to get over their responsibilities, and there are far more rules about what kind of content you can create. He is currently using both Midjourney and DALL-E 2 to create a picture of each platform. He says that the artistic interpretations of Midjourney are very inspiring and have really sparked his imagination and created new ideas, but struggles with practicality, realism and composition. "DALL-E 2's outputs are very functional and direct." There's more practicality, realism, and composition in this picture. He says that Midjourney has a sense of creativity that makes it easy to identify.

The idea ofcensorship is an issue of responsibility for companies to avoid even the smallest possibility of generating a realistic murder scene or something that can be used in a crime, according to the author. He says that Openai explained that nudity is a part of art. They don't have enough faith in their models to guarantee that the system won't generate nude children by accident, but they are accountable for what their software creates, and currently they don't have enough faith in their models to guarantee that it won't generate harmful or illegal The kind of content allowed is controlled by these platforms. Some artists have been frustrated by the fact that the simple binaries of Midjourney's content policies feel more ideological than they actually are. He says that it is not acensorship debate, no matter how much people like to say it. It is a discussion about art.

Image: Rob Sheridan

Image: Rob Sheridan

VIIR fans will have to wait as she finishes the story. Some people have asked if he will make a movie out of it. He says that he has been consuming with a different kind of horror: a newborn baby. He had to get more creative with the way he talks to the Midjourney bot as some of the key concepts used in the original VIIR image are now banned. He is able to produce horror work with it because more horror artists have joined up. Even with limitations, the aesthetic is able to thrive, and I hope that can continue as Midjourney grows.

The way that people tell stories on the best text-to-image generators we have right now will be affected by the evolution of Midjourney's content restrictions. As long as these platforms remain private, the risk of losing more provocative bodily forms of expression will always be there. While neural networks are trained on every painting and piece of art made by humankind, it's humans that can't be trusted to use it to its fullest potential or enforce better standards of art and media literacy The puritanical dystopia of Year Zero, a world where art is a form of resistance, is an example of the underlying moralism that makes art discourse today. For now, most art bots are just tools to make fun of scenarios that don't warrant much more than a two second glance.

Artificial intelligence is something that can be used to help the artist. He says that many people who have creative thoughts and ideas but have never been able to master the technical skills of art are finally able to bring their visions to life in a powerful new way. The net good of this tech outweighs the bad for people who were kept out of visual art for one reason or another. He has concerns about companies trying to wholly own the fruits of their software since they have been trained using the history of human artistry. Everyone can use and retain the rights to their work if we have comparable open- source alternatives.

There are plenty of valid concerns and plenty of ways that it could go down the dark path. It's up to us as artists to get involved, watch what these companies are doing, and be a part of the conversation.