My AI lifeform

I just completed a class on AI.

One of my assignments was to play around with an AI image generator, a first for me. There were about a dozen apps to choose from in the course shell, but I eventually went with Adobe Firefly. After my first few stumbling attempts at creating “art,” I struggled to think of what to try next. It was a sense of “terrible freedom,” staring at the flashing cursor in the prompt, knowing I could, almost, do anything with it. 

Where do I start? 

Out of sheer snark, I asked it to create an image of Batman fighting Michel Foucault. 
I didn't get what I wanted, but I wasn't exactly disappointed, either.

  

Wow.

I was then reminded of a 1999 interview with David Bowie where he so presciently described the internet as, paraphrasing, something that would “crush our concept of mediums” and “show us everything that’s wonderful and terrible about us at the same time.”

The reporter glibly replied, “but it’s just a tool.”

“No, no it’s not,” Bowie said. “It’s an alien life form.”

A “life form” we’ve created. Much like AI.

So I entered “cybernetic life form” into the prompt bar. This is what I got…

Meh. Looks like something my uninspired college kids, half their heads full of anime and the other half full of video games, might’ve come up with. Like any other AI, Firefly is just scraping the web for what it thinks I want, and gave me a mash-up of science fiction in the public consciousness. I tried again with “bioengineered life form.” Firefly spat out a variety of images. Here’s one:

It’s okay. Far more interesting to me is the one that’s at the top of this post. I spent a few minutes just looking at it. The blues and greens are immediately evocative of life, while the presence of purples and aquas say, at least to me anyway, “I’m something different.” It is attached to a seemingly organic lattice work, beneath which are enticingly tortuous and unruly forms like cytoplasm. But it’s the yellow…legs, tentacles, extensions, whatever you want to call them…that captivate me most. They have bulbs on them in places, perhaps like the clitellum on an earthworm. The appendages also look technological, which might make sense given the word “bioengineered” was in my prompt. More than that, their textures immediately remind me of the art of Jack Kirby. So do the colors, for that matter.

I tried to write a flash science fiction piece about it:

“Where does a degree in biology get you?

“Into the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it seems. Such a location helps one get around pesky laws and ‘overregulation that stifles innovation.’ At least that’s what our bosses say. Our research ship is testing new biotech. The efforts in human cloning really aren’t getting anywhere, but we do have this little guy I like to visit on the daily.

“We’ve taken to calling it ‘Orby.’ I can’t remember which one of us said it first. It’s no bigger than the tip of my smallest finger, and when I look at it, I expect to smell the brine and salt of phytoplankton and the sea. Of course I don’t. I don’t smell anything except the sterile lab as Orby is secure behind glass in its habitat. 

“Do we have a new lifeform? Time will tell. First we have to see if we can produce another. If they live long enough to reproduce and pass along their DNA, we have a winner.

“Will that make us *more* human? That’s what one of the bosses says. We are a creative species, and what might stand as our ultimate creation would be entirely new life. Or so they say. I don’t know what to think as I watch Orby behind the glass. Everyone once in a while it moves on its spindly appendages. Not far. Just a skitter in a given direction. Sometimes I’ve seen it tilt its body to point that turquoise…thing…in its midsection right at me.

“Does it know I’m there? Watching it? Is Orby aware its existence is, likely, to be confined in totality to this shoebox-sized habitat? Does it hurt? Can Orby be aware of anything? What do we owe it? What’s our responsibility? 

“I don’t like what these questions are making me think. It’s the kind of thinking that really gets in the way of things. I’m reminded of this poem (I know, who the hell needs poetry?) I had to read while trudging through those useless gen ed classes in undergrad. What was it? ‘The Mouse’s Petition’? 

“Right now, I’ve got this urge to let Orby loose over the side of the ship.

“There’s a security camera in the lab.”

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