This year’s calendar is a collaboration, imagining twelve views of the city with the help of the artificial intelligence Midjourney.
For now the pages are 11×8½ but I can make them into single 11×17 pages later.
I could also easily make a calendar with the art and the holidays, but otherwise with blank days rather than history and blog quotations. If you’d like this kind of calendar, just ask me.
If I use a quote of yours that you’d prefer I didn’t, please let me know and I’ll swap it out.
Comments?
walkerp 09:48 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Whoah November!
Looks lovely.
MarcG 10:24 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
These images are really disturbing and beautiful, nice work! I noticed a small thing: in Feb, the space between ‘last’ and ‘year’ with the allcaps red font isn’t evident.
steph 11:13 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
That looks beautiful. Thanks!
Ephraim 11:17 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Wow… I’ve finally made it into the calendar. In case you wanted to add it, Grand Prix is 16th to 18th of June this year. Okay, fine… it’s important in my planning calendar, not everyone else’s 🙂
Kate 11:37 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Ephraim, I try to put in the major holidays of several traditions. What tradition is Grand Prix a holiday of?
M 11:39 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Nicely done, the images came out really good.
I appreciated seeing some noteworthy historical dates marked which aren’t frequently recalled except in more niche publications.
The quotes from the blog though were kind of hit or miss. Would much rather you take that space to publish something from your own reflections in maintaining this blog and watching Quebec
Kevin 11:45 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
That is absolutely gorgeous, especially the images of Habitat 67 and the one for December.
I love the quotes and the facts about the city. Brilliant work!
/Editing hat on: There’s a typo in my quote in May, (probably in my original text) where it say the word change instead of charge.
shawn 11:51 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Very interesting. How does the “reimagining” work?
Ephraim 12:05 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
@Kate – Those who pray at the altar or dinosaurs and oil… and climate change deniers 😀
DeWolf 12:38 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Nice work, Kate!
Somebody should send the November image to Moshe Safdie. I wonder what he’d think about it.
October makes Montreal look like the capital of a steampunk theocracy.
mare 13:14 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Great work!
(I don’t have any experience with Midjourney other than seeing some other generated images and their prompts. I’m trying to think what your prompts might have been. Something like ‘a painting of [something] in Montreal, Quebec in the [season], in the style of [someone]’ but they were probably much more detailed. No need to divulge the secret sauce, but the typography for sure wasn’t done by an AI!)
PatrickC 13:35 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Lovely ! But that picture of Habitat came as a shock.
Kate 14:14 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
mare, the descriptions were not especially wordy, although I had to put “Montreal” in all of them, otherwise the images came out looking too generic. I wanted them all to reflect something about Montreal, if not faithfully.
The typography is all mine, yes.
shawn, it’s an AI called Midjourney. It’s a hoot to work with – you soon learn to work around its quirks and limitations.
Mark Côté 15:18 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Given a lot of folks here are left-leaning (myself included), I’m a little surprised to not find any comments here about the conversation around the ethics of AI art. I know some artists who are really concerned.
(Probably obligatory: I am not saying “take this down!”; I just think there are very important societal questions regarding the sudden explosion of powerful AI trained on copyrighted content.)
Kate 16:43 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Thanks MarcG and Kevin for corrections.
Mark Côté: I’m not going to profit by this, though. I suppose it’s a PR gesture from the blog, but I don’t think it gets me new readers. I just like finding a new angle each year and making up the calendar.
Tee Owe 17:04 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Like!
MarcG 17:11 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
I would love to purchase a print of the Montreal Metro image but it doesn’t seem right.
Tim S. 18:12 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Interesting, I kinda wish Montreal looked like some of these pictures. Though there’s also a bit of an odd Victorian nostalgia and Blade Runnerish dystopianism mix which I guess is also reflective of Montreal.
Joey 19:34 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Marc – kick it off!
Kate 19:51 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
Mark Côté, I’ve been thinking. When I make an illustration of a thing or a place, I start by researching existing images, collecting ones that can serve as reference, and proceed from there. The final piece will be a synthesis of the various views available to me, whether under copyright or not.
How is what the AI does any different – except that it’s faster?
Tim S., I know, it’s got kind of a mixture of weird Dickensian urban texture and future grunge. It’s not suitable for everything, but it’s a hell of a nice tool.
DeWolf 21:41 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
@Kate It works both ways. I recently interviewed several architects about the potential of AI in their profession, and the answer they gave me is that it’s mainly useful by adding to the mood boards they usually create at the beginning of a project. Apparently architects use a lot of Pinterest and Midjourney is a nice supplement to that.
thomas 22:26 on 2022-12-08 Permalink
My first thought was “if my future is imagined by a computer f- that, I’m not going” but on 2nd thought this looks better than whatever else I had in mind for 2023.
Marc R 01:57 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
reactions to AI-assisted art in 202x have a lot in common with reactions to photograhpical art in 186x; i find it beautiful and surreal (in the literal sense– more than real)
Kate I salute your courage in deploying this technology to supplement the deeply real and human calendar it illustrates and absolutely love the final product as a piece of art
Mark Côté 11:20 on 2022-12-09 Permalink
There are a couple of dimensions. The fidelity is one thing; even parts of artists’ signatures are ending up in AI-generated art. It’s way beyond just imitatng a style; it’s outright copying.
There is a comparable legal challenge right now against Copilot, an AI-driven software tool, because license attention is basically impossible. True when you write a simple piece of code that’s been done hundreds of times, attribution would be hard and probably pointless regardless. But give Copilot something more specialized and you get lengthy code snippets stolen right from someone’s open source repo, the license of which may require attribution, amongst other restrictions.
But the copyright angle may not be the biggest issue. Imitating someone’s style is usually difficult and would therefore be restricted to a relatively small number of talented artists, which means both incidents of outright copying would be lower and easier to trace. AI art completely commodifies this process now. The argument is that it heavily devalues art and artists, far beyond what photography did, which is a very different medium from, say, painting. Is this aspect illegal? Maybe, maybe not. Is it unethical and societally harmful? There’s a strong argument there.
As usual, the software industry is shrugging and saying “it’s not our problem what people do with this tool we built” while potentially massively disrupting and undermining yet another industry. I’m surprised there aren’t more comparisons to, say, what Uber did to taxis. I can’t help but think that the major difference is that this is fun to play with for the average person, unlike driving a taxi.