You may or may not recall that in the early days of the Internet, when HTML was simple, if you liked a page you went to the source version and borrowed big chunks of clever html. Then HTML got all complicated, and you can’t easily do that anymore. But now you can do the same thing with AI prompts, if the original prompter is careless–as in the sense of doesn’t care.

I was looking for a cover for my song How Many Times, which asks the question “How many times have we been together,” with the stinger “Would I do it again? You Bet.”

I scoured the Internet and found this perfect art for “past lives”

I liked this illustration so much I asked for the right to reproduce it. Then I noticed the filename:
A-person-sitting-in-deep-meditation-remembering-their-past-lives.-The-scene-is-ethereal-and-dreamlike-with-the-persons-current-self-in-the-foreground

If you give that same prompt to an AI picture generator, you get a slightly different picture

Rendered (by request) as a 3000 pixel by 3000 pixel square, as required by Spotify, with the title in 24 point Garamond. I find this kind of creepy.

As a man who has been shaking my fist at AI for some time, I have to confess this charmed me. Despite my loathing of AI and my hope that it will not replace all artists and writers, the illustration on my article resulted from “a crowd of anthropomorphic ham sandwiches in the street, protesting with signs that say “no more indictments.” Witch hunts and end the charges were embellishments that surprised me a little.

And frankly I am shocked at the hats and applause. I wrote the head before I prompted for the illustration.