Man At A Bus Stop (The AI Wars)

I received an invitation to give Adobe Firefly – their new Artificial Intelligence generated creative system – a try, and at the same time I was trying to work out what to do with a rather tired old photograph I took almost sixty years ago. The photograph was taken in Halifax and shows a bus at a bus stop, with a man walking down the street having just got off the bus.

For whatever reason, the sight of a man at a bus stop stimulated my attempts at creativity all those years ago (with, I must confess, debatable results), so I decided to issue a similar challenge to the very best in twenty-first century Artificial Intelligence. I therefore instructed Adobe Firefly to create an image of “a man at a bus stop in 1960s industrial landscape”. Here is what it came up with –

Even accepting that my picture from 1965 was less than inspiring, I have to say that the AI creation leaves a fair amount to be desired. I can only imagine the reaction of his fellow passengers had this chap really stepped on to the No 23 to Copley. I decided to try a compromise solution, so I invited AI to mess around with some well established filters (Adobe Photoshop’s Neural Filters) and apply them to my original 1960s image, The result is a compromise – and a not unpleasant compromise at that!