Artificial intelligence (AI) has a whole lot of hugely valuable uses - but sometimes, it's the more frivolous things that are the most fun.
Case in point: when UNILAD asked AI image generator Midjourney to create images of the 'average' fan for all kinds of music genres.
This meant feeding it prompts about, for example, techno fans or acid house fans, to see how the end results differed.
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Differ they did, too, with some hugely varied outcomes - in fact, both the techno and acid house fans were interesting places to start. Both look almost like they're part-robot, with headphones that blend into their heads a little, and the acid house fan was just a little too yellow.
Things get more traditional when it turns to rock and heavy metal fans, both of whom are striking a rockstar pose and shredding a guitar in their portraits, and both with flowing locks.
Amusingly, asking the AI to show the average classical music fan has resulted in what looks like a painted portrait of a composer from a couple of centuries ago, showing how AI can become tangled up by its library of reference images.
In fact, quite a lot of the time it's like the AI is actually making a portrait of a musician from that genre rather than a fan - when it shows a country music fan, it again could be an album cover from the mid-Noughties, right down to the US flag draped in the background.
At least the average dance fan is shown actually dancing - having a huge night in fact - but the disco fan, by comparison, looks like they're caught in an otherworldly kaleidoscope.
Finally, one of the AI's most credible creations comes when asked to show a dubstep fan - this young man looks right and his headphones aren't muddled or weird-looking (even if he is giving us a bit of a death stare). It's just a shame that the background looks like a green screen!
The series of portraits is a pretty good showcase of where we're at with AI generation at the moment - it shows how quickly an AI platform can come up with something that seems credible at first glance.
However, it's when you stop to examine things a bit more closely that it becomes easier to see the seams and the inconsistencies, whether it's the classic tell-tale sign of garbled fingers or just details that look 'off' or blurry. So, there's still a long way to go, but if you're a music fan you could still get quite a kick out of these portraits.
